Ah the delight of sinking into the prose of a delicious argument. Umberto Eco ruminates over the fate of books in a computer age, taking note of purpose — researching on the web is much less laborious than consulting several tomes (which have to be acquired and may be outdated), but a detective novel in one's pocket is easier than carting a computer.
A tidbit. from his talk in Alexandria, Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books.
Up to now, books still represent the most economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at a very low cost. Computer communication travels ahead of you; books travel with you and at your speed. If you are shipwrecked on a desert island, where you don't have the option of plugging in a computer, a book is still a valuable instrument. Even if your computer has solar batteries, you cannot easily read it while lying in a hammock. Books are still the best companions for a shipwreck, or for the day after the night before. Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.
Two new inventions, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market. It will probably eliminate bookstores, but it will not eliminate books, and it will not eliminate libraries, the only places where books can be found in order to scan and reprint them. Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.
The second invention is the e-book where by inserting a micro- cassette in the book's spine or by connecting it to the internet one can have a book printed out in front of us. Even in this case, however, we shall still have a book, though as different from our current ones as ours are different from old manuscripts on parchment, and as the first Shakespeare folio of 1623 is different from the last Penguin edition. Yet, up to now e-books have not proved to be commercially successful as their inventors hoped. I have been told that some hackers, grown up on computers and unused to browsing books, have finally read great literary masterpieces on e-books, but I think that the phenomenon remains very limited. In general, people seem to prefer the traditional way of reading a poem or a novel on printed paper. E-books will probably prove to be useful for consulting information, as happens with dictionaries or special documents. They will probably help students obliged to bring with them ten or more books when they go to school, but they will not substitute for other kinds of books that we love to read in bed before sleep, for example.
Aside from dismissing the notion that computers stamp out books as simplistic, he also tackles the more curious question: what does it mean to read a text in an age of hyperlinking? While this opens up a given text to other texts, all exist in a finite system. Indeed, Eco points out:
A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified. Suppose you are reading Tolstoy's War and Peace: you desperately wish that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel Anatolij; you desperately wish that the marvellous person who is Prince Andrej will not die, and that he and Natasha will live together forever. If you had War and Peace on a hypertextual and interactive CD-ROM, you could rewrite your own story according to your desires; you could invent innumerable "War and Peaces", where Pierre Besuchov succeeds in killing Napoleon, or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov. What freedom, what excitement! Every Bouvard or Pécuchet could become a Flaubert!
Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.
How to Build a Better Ballot (PDF) by David Chaum addresses the problem of how to verify votes without compromising the secrecy of the ballot.
From the press release:
The new type of receipt is printed in two layers by a modified version of familiar receipt printers. You can read it clearly in the booth, but before leaving, you must separate the layers and choose which one to keep. Either one you take has the vote information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except with numeric keys divided among computers run by election officials)
It started with the teaser: her grandmother committed suicide, her mother almost killed her with a meat cleaver .... All showing that life is stranger than fiction, even for a novelist:
Reading [ The Opposite of Fate], one discovers that she is living proof of the maxim that truth is stranger than fiction.[Amy] Tan says she had contemplated turning certain aspects of her life into a novel but decided it wouldn't work.It was just so ridiculous in many ways that it seemed improbable as fiction. It had to be written as autobiography.Throughout her life, Tan has been a magnet for extraordinary events and near-disasters. ... Just to select a few: she has been in two car crashes, robbed at gunpoint, nearly raped, almost drowned, asked to identify the body of her best friend and flatmate who was tortured and murdered by intruders (by chance Tan was away from the flat that night), threatened with death by stalkers and almost swept away in a mudslide.
For a while, I did think I was terribly unlucky, but when I considered it, I thought ‘How many people could have gone through all these bad things and not ever have anything that serious happen to them?’ I must be incredibly lucky.
Tragedy yet yields to comedy when Amy Tan reviews the CliffsNotes version of The Joy Luck Club (from The Opposite of Fate):
In page after chilling page, I saw that my book [The Joy Luck Club] had been hacked apart, autopsied, and permanently embalmed into chapter-by-chapter blow-by-blows: plot summaries, genealogy charts, and—ai-ya!—even Chinese horoscopes. Further in, I was impressed to learn of all the clever nuances I'd apparently embedded into the phrase “invisible strength,” which is what a mother in the book taught her chess-playing daughter, Waverly. According to Cliff, I meant for "“invisible strength” to refer to the “human will,” as well as to represent “female power” and “the power of foreigners.” It was amazing what I had accomplished.
The truth is, I borrowed that phrase from my mother, who used to say something like it to me whenever I was whining out loud. She'd say, “Fang pi bu-cho, cho pi bu-fang,” which is commonly uttered by Chinese parents, and which translates approximately to: “There's more power in silence.”
What my mother intended that I understand, however, was precisely this: ”No one wants to hear you make a big stink over nothing, so shut up.“ The strict linguist might want to note that the literal translation of that Chinese phrase runs along these noble lines: “Loud farts don't smell, the really smelly ones are deadly silent.”
Anyway, that's the sort of literary symbolism I use with phrases like “invisible strength”—not the sort of analysis you find in CliffsNotes, I might add.
Here is my wishlist for Christmas: hardware that stops viruses cold. A Washington University professor, John Lockwood, and his graduate students developed Hardware to detect Malware. According to Lockwood:
The FPX uses several patented technologies in order to scan for the signatures of malware quickly. Unlike existing network intrusion systems, the FPX uses hardware, not software, to scan data quickly. The FPX can scan each and every byte of every data packet transmitted through a network at a rate of 2.4 billion bits per second. In other words, the FPX could scan every word in the entire works of Shakespeare in about 1/60th of a second.
The article, New system halts malware explains:
Lockwood's group has developed and implemented circuits that process the Internet protocol (IP) packets directly in hardware. They have also developed several circuits that rapidly scan streams of data for strings or regular expressions in order to find the signatures of malware carried within the payload of Internet packets. [Lockwood said:]
On the FPX, the reconfigurable hardware can be dynamically reconfigured over the network to search for new attack patterns. Should a new Internet worm or virus be detected, multiple FPX devices can be immediately programmed to search for their signatures.
Each FPX device then filters traffic passing over the network, so that it can immediately quarantine a virus or Internet worms within sub networks (subnets). By just installing a few such devices between subnets, a single device can protect thousands of users. By installing multiple devices at key locations throughout a network, large networks can be protected.
Best of all, this smartly treats not just the technological problem of keeping viri and their ilk at bay, but the human factor as well. FPX shifts anti-virus efforts back to those who maintain computers, rather than depending on an idealized user who patches their system and never follows a questionable link.
Way back we at the office ran smack-dab into the problem of categories for work blogs: how do you come up with a list of categories that is short, obvious, and comprehensive? Or do you just have this huge list of duplicative categories somehow capturing information imperfectly but sufficiently well? Even better is this solution, discussed by Jon Udell: use the metadata.
Martinez's insight is that in a Web services network, the packets (XML payloads) tend to accrete metadata that can usefully be mined. Relative to the SemWeb discussion, I'd add that this contextual metadata arises naturally, without extra effort, when a business process has been automated—or, to be more realistic, semi-automated. When Jack routes a purchase order to Jill through the BizTalk pipeline, the context is explicitly encoded in the transaction.
What happens if Jack detaches the purchase order from the BizTalk pipeline, as an InfoPath document, and routes it to Jill via email? Now the context is only implicitly encoded in the transaction. The trick is going to be figuring out how to make the implicit context explicit, without interfering with the natural flow of the transaction.
So the question really is how to track metadata of standard transactions and pull filtered data up through some search mechanism, without having real categories at all.
Phil Windley ties this idea of virtually asssembling bits of information through search-based RSS feeds on the fly:
The search-based RSS feeds on this site are virtual views of the news headlines. I think there's more to this idea of not trying to categorize things, but simply create views into the data, files, emails, whatever. Its more flexible than hard coded categories and search has clearly won out on the Internet over categorization for this very reason. As the amount of stuff on my hard drive grows, why not apply the same principal there as well? From the RESTian standpoint, this is an example of Web services, and example of how standards enable intermediaries.
Given computers have no general organizational schema (Dewey decimal) which are commonly known and used, why not have virtual views? Keep everything in one large container and provide a filtering mechanism based on metadata and content (if RSS-like), and from the user's perspective, the actual location of information becomes irrelevant. Among other blessings, this might also make systems administration a bit simpler: there are files which display to users and those which don't.
Some useful (to me at any rate) links
Revenge of the Bacteria, the outcome of our carelessness with antibiotics is the subject of this op-ed:
Every day in the United States, 100 men, women and children—40,000 or more every year—die from infections caused by bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. The number, which is larger than the number who die from AIDS, may actually be higher, because many deaths, particularly those of elderly patients suffering myriad problems, may in reality stem from these “superbugs.”
Antibiotics have become the foundation of modern medicine. They are an essential ingredient not only in combating disease but also in transplanting organs—heart, kidney, liver and others—as well as surgery of all kinds. Without antibiotics, few surgeries would be “routine” because of the constant threat of death from infection.
The bacteria that were neutralized by antibiotics, however, did not disappear. Like other living organisms, they have responded to the challenge and adapted. Now medicine is encountering deadly new strains of bacteria that resist powerful antibiotics. Some strains already have appeared that are immune to all existing antibiotics.
Why are our miracle drugs failing us? One reason—well documented—is that we have used them too often, to treat infections and conditions that more often than not could be defeated by the body's immune system without medical intervention. Another reason is that antibiotics have become omnipresent, in our food and water supply, as farmers feed them to cattle and poultry and spray them on crops. As we ingest them in low doses, bacteria become familiar with them and mutate to protect themselves.
Although they advocate the obvious, reducing the use of antibiotics to only needed situations and cleaning up hospitals—including hand-washing among healthcare workers between seeing patients— the authors argue that the problem lies with the market for developing new antibiotics:
These are positive steps, but they alone are insufficient. We are in desperate need of new antibiotics and other drugs to treat infections. Few drug companies are developing new antibiotics, and most of these are closely related to existing drugs. Hence, they are theoretically less likely to baffle bacteria very long.
What we need and what we are not getting—and under present circumstances will not get—are entirely new types of antibiotics with characteristics unknown to the new strains of bacteria lying in wait.
The authors argue drug companies want to make broad-spectrum antibiotics, the opposite of what interests the medical field, which exemplifies the problem of ignoring how actual incentives in a system can distort the marketplace. Are there ways to align the need for more, selective antibiotics with drug companies' imperative to make money?
cran \Cran\ (kr[a^]n), Crane \Crane\ (kr[=a]n), n. [Scot., fr. Gael. crann.] A measure for fresh herrings, — as many as will fill a barrel. [Scot.] —H. Miller. Source.
Just a reminder to self to see Windows types and other types, Jon Udell's comments on the major classes of XML documents, RPC-SOAP and document-oriented ones, with the lovely commonality these offer and the future possibilities:
Finally, I've drawn attention to a remarkable synergy that InfoPath, most notably, makes possible. The message payloads exchanged on the Web services network, and the documents read and written by people, can be the same texts, governed by the same datatype and structure definitions. And those texts are universal in scope, not tied to any platform or framework. True, InfoPath is a Windows-only creature, but since it's built on open standards, InfoPath-like software can exist on other platforms and can interoperate with InfoPath.
But,
We have yet to even scratch the surface of what's possible given these circumstances. And now here comes WinFS with its own proprietary schema language.