Netizen

Friday, October 17, 2014

Net Neutrality: A Counter Viewpoint

Net neutrality to me is obvious. I don't want the Internet to go the way of cable television. Expanding capacity is how you respond to an increase in traffic load.

But it is okay to listen to a counter viewpoint.

The Right Way to Fix the Internet

Letting go of an obsession with net neutrality could free technologists to make online services even better. ..... the Internet never has been entirely neutral. Wireless networks, for example, have been built for many years with features that help identify users whose weak connections are impairing the network with slow traffic and incessant requests for dropped packets to be resent. Carriers’ technology assures that such users’ access is rapidly constrained, so that one person’s bad connection doesn’t create a traffic jam for everyone. ..... It costs more to get online in the United States than just about anywhere else in the developed world ..... U.S. service is sometimes twice as expensive as what’s available in Europe—and slower, too. ...... the Internet arose in an ad hoc fashion; there is no Internet constitution to cite. ..... their equivalent of the Federalist Papers: a 1981 article by computer scientists Jerome Saltzer, David Reed, and David Clark. The authors’ ambitions for that paper (“End-to-End Arguments in System Design”) had been modest: to lay out technical reasons why tasks such as error correction should be performed at the edges, or end points, of the network—where the users are—rather than at the core. In other words, ISPs should operate “dumb pipes” that merely pass traffic along. This paper took on a remarkable second life as the Internet grew. In his 2000 book Code, a discussion of how to regulate the Internet, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig said the lack of centralized control embodied in the 1981 end-to-end principle was “one of the most important reasons that the Internet produced the innovation and growth that it has enjoyed.” ...... “unavoidable vagueness” about the dividing line between allowable network-management decisions and impermissible bias. .. The line remains as blurry as ever, which is one reason the debate over net neutrality is so intense. ......... if profit-hungry companies are left unfettered to choose how to handle various types of traffic, they “will continue to change the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them, but not necessarily for the rest of us.” ........ codifying too many overarching principles for the Internet makes many engineers uncomfortable. In their view, the network is a constant work in progress, requiring endless pragmatism. Its backbone is constantly being torn apart and rebuilt. The best means of connecting various networks with one another are always in flux. ......... “You can’t change congestion by passing net neutrality or doing that kind of thing,” says Tom Leighton, cofounder and chief executive of Akamai Technologies. .. To keep traffic humming online, Leighton says, “you’re going to need technology.” ........ A central tenet of net neutrality is that “best efforts” should be applied equally when transmitting every packet moving through the Internet, regardless of who the sender, recipient, or carriers might be. But that principle merely freezes the setup of the Internet as it existed nearly a quarter-century ago, says Michael Katz, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has worked for the FCC and consulted for Verizon. “You can say that every bit is a bit,” Katz adds, “but every bitstream isn’t the same bitstream.” Video and voice transmissions are highly vulnerable to errors, delays, and packet loss. Data transmissions can survive rougher handling. If some consumers want their Internet connections to deliver ultrahigh-resolution movies with perfect fidelity, those people would be better served, Katz argues, by more flexible arrangements that might indeed prioritize video. Efficiency might be more desirable than a strict adherence to equity for all bits. ......... For many years, high-volume sites run by Facebook, YouTube, Apple, and the like have been negotiating arrangements with many companies that ferry data to your Internet service provider—backbone operators, transit providers, and content delivery networks—to ensure that the most popular content is distributed as smoothly as possible. Often, this means paying a company such as Akamai to stash copies of highly in-demand content on multiple servers all over the world, so that a stampede for World Cup highlights creates as little strain as possible on the overall Internet..................... Netflix last year was accounting for as much as one-third of all U.S. Internet traffic on Friday evenings. .... In the short term, Netflix resolved the problem by paying for more of the peering points that carriers such as Comcast and Verizon required. More strategically, Netflix is arranging to put its servers in Internet service providers’ facilities, providing them with easier access to its content. ....... the Netflix fight shouldn’t distract regulators who are trying to figure out the best way to keep the Internet open. They should be focusing, he says, on making sure that everyday customers are getting high-speed Internet as cheaply and reliably as possible, and that small-time publishers of Internet content can distribute their work. .... A tiny video startup doesn’t generate enough volume to force Comcast to install extra peering points. ........ “zero rating,” in which consumers are allowed to try certain applications without incurring any bandwidth-usage charges. The app providers usually pay the wireless carriers to offer that access as a way of building up their market share in a hurry... In much of Africa, people with limited usage plans can enjoy free access to Facebook or Wikipedia this way. ......... In the United States, T-Mobile lets customers tap into a half-dozen music sites, such as Pandora and Spotify, without incurring usage charges. ...... When Tim Wu talked about net neutrality a decade ago, he framed it as a way of ensuring maximum competition on the Internet. But in the current debate, that rationale is in danger of being coöpted into a protectionist defense of the status quo. If there’s anything the Internet’s evolution has taught us, it’s that innovation comes rapidly, and in unexpected ways. We need a net neutrality strategy that prevents the big Internet service providers from abusing their power—but still allows them to optimize the Internet for the next wave of innovation and efficiency.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Going Head To Head With Carbon

Carbon dioxide (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

ball-and-stick model of CO2: carbon dioxide (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Negatives emissions feel counter intuitive. Why not capture the carbon right where it is emitted? Would that not be cheaper?

Can Sucking CO2 Out of the Atmosphere Really Work?

air capture, which means, essentially, scrubbing it from the sky. ..... As emissions have accelerated—they’re now rising at 2 percent per year, twice as rapidly as they did in the last three decades of the 20th century—scientists have begun to recognize the urgency of achieving so-called “negative emissions.” ..... “Once capturing carbon from the air is profitable, people acting in their own self-interest will make it happen” ...... In the winter of 2008 Eisenberger sequestered himself in a quiet house with big glass windows overlooking the ocean in Mendocino County, California. There he studied existing literature on capturing carbon and made a key decision. ...... a 40-foot-high tower of fans, steel, and silver tubes ..“It’s doing exactly what the tree is doing,” says Eisenberger. But then he corrects himself. “Well, actually, it’s doing it a lot better.” ....... “There’s really little chance that you could capture CO2 from ambient air more cheaply than from a coal plant, where the flue gas is 300 times more concentrated” ...... deriving fuels from biomass—which removes CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows. As that feedstock is fermented in a reactor to create ethanol, it produces a stream of pure carbon dioxide that can be captured and stored underground ...... scientific advances made in air capture will eventually be used primarily on coal and gas power plants.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Journey To The Edge Of The Universe

Monday, October 13, 2014

Extreme Orbits

That 80-20 Rule

Looks like Wikipedia has its own 1%. I knew that, but this application to surveys is novel and interesting.

Inspired by Wikipedia, Social Scientists Create a Revolution in Online Surveys

Most of the information on Wikipedia comes from a tiny proportion of users. Now social scientists are collecting data in a similar way, allowing participants to design surveys as they contribute. ..... “Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants, we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents” ..... a wiki survey. This starts with a set of seed questions but allows respondents to add their own questions as the survey involves. ..... this format allows participants to respond to as many choices as they wish. They call this property greediness. ...... These included ideas that would have been unlikely to emerge through other data gathering methods, such as “Keep NYC’s drinking water clean by banning fracking in NYC’s watershed” and “Plug ships into electricity grid so they don’t idle in port—reducing emissions equivalent to 12,000 cars per ship.” ...... “If Wikipedia were to allow 10 and only 10 edits per editor—akin to a survey that requires respondents to complete one and only one form—it would exclude about 95% of the edits contributed”

Trade Agreements Bring Peace

English: Red (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

India and Pakistan, take heed.

Network Theory Reveals The Hidden Link Between Trade And Military Alliances That Leads to Conflict-Free Stability

There was a time when historians focused largely on events as the be all and end all of history. But in recent years, there has been a growing understanding that a complex network of links, alliances, trade agreements and so on play a hugely important role in creating an environment in which conflict (or peace) can spread. ..... “The pressure to economize on alliances conflicts with stability against the formation of new alliances, which leads to instability and would suggest chaotic dynamics,” they say. “This instability provides insights into the constantly shifting structures and recurring wars that occurred throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.” ...... Between 1820 and 1959, there were 10 times as many wars per year on average between each possible pair of countries than between 1960 and 2000 ..... it is the formation of trade links between countries that has created the stability that has prevented wars. ..... there has been a rapid increase in global trade since World War II, not least because of the advent of container shipping in the 1960s. ..... trade provides a reason to maintain an alliance .... these economic considerations reduce the incentive to attack another country since trade will be disrupted ......... a rich family of stable networks ...... the initiating event is a poor predictor of the eventual size of an epidemic, fashion or war.

Mail, Calendar, Maps, Notifications

Fred Wilson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fred Wilson has summed it up nice.

It is like, I would send this dude a SMS. And he would respond to it like I had sent him a snail mail. He would take his sweet time. Ends up the culprit was the iOS notification system.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Microsoft's Quantum Computer

English: Qubits are made up of controlled particles and the means of control (e.g. devices that trap particles and switch them from one state to another). There are 4 established qubit candidates: ion traps, quantum dots, semiconductor impurities, and superconducting circuits. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was thinking Microsoft might take itself back to the cutting edge through taking the lead in the Natural User Interace (NUI). But I might be wrong.

Microsoft’s Quantum Computer

Since the physicist Richard Feynman first suggested the idea of a quantum computer in 1982, theorists have proved that such a machine could solve problems that would take the fastest conventional computers hundreds of millions of years or longer. Quantum computers might, for example, give researchers better tools to design novel medicines or super-efficient solar cells. They could revolutionize artificial intelligence. .........“What we’re doing is analogous to setting out to make the first transistor,” says Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research. “What we’re doing is analogous to setting out to make the first transistor,” says Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research. .... a machine made up of only hundreds of qubits could run chemistry simulations beyond the capacity of any existing supercomputer. ...... a corporation widely thought to be stuck in computing’s past may unlock its future. ...... A mathematical prodigy who entered UC Berkeley at the age of 16 and grad school two years later, Freedman was 30 when he solved a version of one of the longest-standing problems in mathematics, the Poincaré conjecture. He worked it out without writing anything down, visualizing the distortion of four-dimensional shapes in his head. “I had seen my way through the argument,” Freedman recalls. When he translated that inner vision into a 95-page proof, it earned the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics. ......... he was drawn into physics in 1988 after a colleague discovered a connection between some of the math describing the topology of knots and a theory explaining certain quantum phenomena. “It was a beautiful thing,” says Freedman. He immediately saw that this connection could allow a machine governed by that same quantum physics to solve problems too hard for conventional computers. Ignorant that the concept of quantum computing already existed, he had independently reinvented it. ....... A qubit can enter a quantum state known as superposition, which effectively represents 0 and 1 at the same time. Once in a superposition state, qubits can become linked, or “entangled,” in a way that means any operation affecting one instantly changes the fate of another. Because of superposition and entanglement, a single operation in a quantum computer can execute parts of a calculation that would take many, many more operations for an equivalent number of ordinary bits. A quantum computer can essentially explore a huge number of possible computational pathways in parallel. For some types of problems, a quantum computer’s advantage over a conventional one grows exponentially with the amount of data to be crunched. ........ “They change the foundation of computer science and what we mean by what is computable.” ....... The largest number of qubits that have been operated together is just seven. ...... The conventional approach being pursued by Microsoft offers a fully programmable computer—the equivalent of a full toolbox. ...... To speed progress and set the stage for possible mass production, Microsoft has begun working with industrial companies to secure supplies of semiconductor nanowires and the superconducting electronics that would be needed to control a topological qubit. ........ At Bell Labs in New Jersey .. If he is right, Willett is farther along than anyone who is working with Microsoft. And in his series of small, careworn labs, he is now preparing to build what—if it works—will be the world’s first topological qubit. “We’re making the transition from the science to the technology now,” he says. His effort has historical echoes. Down the corridor from his labs is a glass display case with the first transistor inside, made on this site in 1947. ......... Willett sees himself as an academic colleague of the Microsoft researchers rather than a corporate competitor, and he still gets invited to Freedman’s twice-yearly symposiums that bring Microsoft collaborators and other leading physicists to Santa Barbara. But Microsoft management has been more evident at recent meetings, Willett says, and he has sometimes felt that his being from another corporation made things awkward. ....... For Microsoft to open up a practical route to quantum computing would be surprising. For the withered Bell Labs, owned by a company not even in the computing business, it would be astounding. ....... Microsoft’s leafy campus in Redmond .. In the main research building, Krysta Svore leads a dozen people working on software for computers that may never exist. The team is figuring out what the first generation of quantum computers could do for us. ....... No quantum computer is ever going to fit into your pocket, because of the way qubits need to be supercooled ...... they would be used like data centers or supercomputers to power services over the Internet, or to solve problems that allow other technologies to be improved. ....... One promising idea is to use quantum computers for superpowered chemistry simulations that could accelerate progress on major problems in areas such as health or energy. A quantum computer could simulate reality so precisely that it could replace years of plodding lab work ...... Today roughly a third of U.S. supercomputer time is dedicated to simulations for chemistry or materials science, according to the Department of Energy. ...... quantum computers can be used for machine learning ...... Recent advances in image and speech recognition have triggered a frenzy of new research in artificial intelligence. ...... the first company to build a quantum computer might gain an advantage virtually unprecedented in the history of technology. “We believe that there’s a chance to do something that could be the foundation of a whole new economy” ..... It’s as if qubit technology is in a superposition between changing the world and decohering into nothing more than a series of obscure research papers.