The Raven

Monday, February 3, 2003

The Color of Data

You may have noticed that I often make reference to the datastream when I talk about what I'm pulling out of the aether in the mornings, and I thought that it might be worthwhile to offer a definition of that term. As a metaphor, consider the colored rectangle to the right. This represents the kind of information the majority of Net users are either uploading or downloading at any given time. The morning hours seem to be oriented toward hard news, breaking stories, and that's shaded purple at the bottom. As the day progresses, there's less concentration on hard individual value and more emphasis on softer collective arts, gaming, entertainment, rising upward toward the redder hues.

To capture this movement in the shape of data, I try to have three or four windows open scanning various news and comment sites, like AP, BBC, and a number of papers, and eventually patterns begin to emerge out of the babble, as if you were walking through a crowded party and catching bits of conversation. Choosing to focus on the unusual or the larger topics is a matter of sharpening or loosening your attention, and throughout the course of a day the wave of emphasis changes by degrees. That's one way I'm seeing it, which leads into the following:

The Architect

Tim Berners-Lee, who's credited with having pioneered research into HTTP, HTML, URLs, and other Web components, is pushing for a new layer to the Net, or possibly even a revision of its main protocols, which he's calling the Semantic Web. At first glance, the key difference involves the widespread application of metadata to Web elements.

OWL (for Ontology Web Language), RDF (Resource Descriptor Framework), URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) and DAML (Darpa Agency Mark-up Language) [whereby] documents and data will be annotated with special codes allowing computers to search and analyze the Web automatically.

Of particular interest is the potential for realizing this:

Berners-Lee described all sorts of analytical tools [that] might replace our aging Web browsers, letting us display data by color codes, by geographic maps or by types of sources searched.

So one application might look something like our colored rectangle metaphor, possibly in three dimensions, that would allow queries as to the nature of Internet activity and offer an image of a global mind. The main obstacle to all this is the metadata coding responsibility incumbent upon data providers. Couldn't that be automated in some way?

6:28:47 PM

Love and War

A strange irony tinges this morning's info-stream in shades of burnt orange. The overwhelming focus is on two stories—the Challenger 7 and our preparations for war. One thread directs our attention to the future of our species, the other strongly underlines how far we have yet to go.

Not Your Father's Gulf War

That's the story at the International Herald Tribune this morning. They've uncovered a look at our opening strategy for taking Baghdad.

Here you see a Walleye I electro-optical guided bomb, which would likely be one component of an initial holocaust of 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles to be unleashed on Iraq "in the first 48 hours" of the air campaign. That's around 10 times the number of such weapons used in the Gulf War.

Military planners said the immediate goals would be to break the Iraqi Army[base ']s will to fight, driving a large number of troops to surrender or defect—and offering them guarded sanctuary if they do—while cutting off the leadership in Baghdad in hopes of causing a rapid collapse of the government of President Saddam Hussein.

They'll also be using "high-powered microwave weapons" to flash-fry enemy computers and equipment with "millions of watts of electricity." The idea is to disable Iraq's infrastructure without destroying it, so that vital services like water and electricity can be quickly restored. From the scenario outlined here, the first day or two of the engagement will be utterly horrific by any conception. Would that words could prevent this.

The Double Helix

While Albert Einstein has the title of "Most Influential Person of the Twentieth Century," you can also argue that no one's achievement will have a greater impact on our lives than Professor James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix.

The UK Independent secured an exclusive interview with Watson on the 50th anniversary of his discovery, and it's worth a look because of a proposal he's making that "everybody in Europe and the U.S. should have their genetic fingerprints entered into an international database," with an eye to assisting law enforcement efforts at curbing "crime and terrorism in an unstable world."

"It is not that I am insensitive to the concerns about individual privacy or to the potential for inappropriate use of genetic information, but it would make life safer."

Quite to the point, he says that the need for security now overrides any possible objection based on preserving civil liberties, or as he puts it, "this particular form of anonymity." I would suggest that security and privacy co-exist in an intertwined double-helix of trade-offs between safety and freedom.

Paedophilic Pop

That's what they're calling the strangely marketed efforts of Julia Volkova, 17, and Lena Katina, 18, the Russian duo Tatu. Remarkably, they're currently heading the UK charts with their single, "All the Things She Said," but it's their "raunchy video" that shows them cavorting with each other in school uniforms that's got a lot of people rather upset.

The duo's creator, Ivan Shapovalov, has admitted that Tatu are what he called an "underage sex project" designed to appeal to men in search of "underage entertainment."

A glance at a fansite reveals that Ivan has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and Tatu is now packaged for the hentai connoisseur. On the other hand, Tatu has an electronic, almost trance-like sound, which you can listen to here in a Real Audio clip of "How Soon Is Now." I'd say they're far better than their U.S. counterparts with whom they're battling, and all's fair in love and war.

10:12:18 AM