"Another 10 percent have to go ... and the industry won't need them back."

Are you still working in the telecom industry?

Job Cuts Take Heavy Toll on Telecom Industry

From Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, this publication might be compared to the Harvard Business Review. Here's a soundbite about the center:

The Center for Business Innovation is a source of new knowledge and insights for management. We exist to discover and develop innovations in strategy, organization, and technology that deliver high value to business. Our work, performed in collaboration with leading thinkers in business, academe, and other research organizations, fuels development of new strategic consulting services, and is communicated broadly to general business audiences.

On the subject of "connected innovation", the current issue of their journal includes, among other things, an interview with Alan Kay.

Alan Kay is one of the most influential computer scientists of the modern era. His contributions, among many others, include the concept of the personal computer. We sat down with him to discuss his take on how innovations happen.

In brief, Alan Kay rocks.

Interview with Alan Kay in the Journal of the Center for Business Innovation

KPNQwest owns Europe's largest data network, spanning 18 European countries and connecting 60 cities. It went bust amid losses which it blamed on a slump in demand for capacity.

It's one bright, shiny share of KPNQwest for you if you can guess the identity of their auditor.

KPNQwest to be broken up | Financial Times

Abstract: We discuss a number of message-passing algorithms that can be efficiently used to search through power-law networks. Most of these algorithms are meant to be improvements for peer-to-peer file sharing systems, and some may also shed some light on how unstructured social networks with certain topologies might function relatively efficiently with local information. Like the networks that they are designed for, these algorithms are completely decentralized, and they exploit the power-law link distribution in the node degree. We demonstrate that some of these search algorithms can work well on real Gnutella networks, scale sub-linearly with the number of nodes, and may help reduce the network search traffic that tends to cripple such networks.

To appear in: 'Handbook of Graphs and Networks: From the Genome to the Internet', S. Bornholdt and H.G. Schuster (eds.), Wiley-VCH, Berlin, 2002.

Local Search in Unstructured Networks [PDF]

Here's a primer on the PLO from a specialist at the Congressional Research Service. Identifies the major players involved and provides a paragraph or two on each of them.

Summary: During the current Palestinian uprising, several Palestinian factions apparently linked in varying degrees to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have used violence in an effort to force Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territory. There is a debate over the degree to which PLO Chairman and Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat is willing and able to prevent anti-Israel violence by these factions.

The PLO and Its Factions [PDF]

In Spring 2001, Virginia Tech professor Naren Ramakrishnan taught an entire course on the topic of recommender systems. Here you can browse the syllabus, review slides from the lectures, and review the reading list.

Course overview: CS 6604 concentrates on algorithms, methodologies, systems, and larger-scope issues (economic, commercial etc.) pertaining to reducing information overload. The unique aspect of this course will be how it integrates ideas from diverse areas: numerical analysis (strange but true), information systems, human-computer interaction, and algorithmics. Over the past three years, a large body of literature on recommender systems, filtering, and personalization technologies has been developed. Even though the field is driven by commercial trends and industrial developments, many of the ideas are nearing a stage of stabilization when their use is becoming common place (textbook material). CS 6604 will help illustrate the interplay between these different areas and demonstrate how ideas from diverse backgrounds can be combined in novel and sophisticated ways.

CS 6604: Recommender Systems (Spring 2001)

A PhD thesis from Virginia Tech, published in 2001. (The PDF file is 3.8 MB, so be patient.)

Abstract: Recommender systems have become paramount to customize information access and reduce information overload. They serve multiple uses, ranging from suggesting products and artifacts (to consumers), to bringing people together by the connections induced by (similar) reactions to products and services. This thesis presents a graph-theoretic model that casts recommendation as a process of `jumping connections' in a graph. In addition to emphasizing the social network aspect, this viewpoint provides a novel evaluation criterion for recommender systems. Algorithms for recommender systems are distinguished not in terms of predicted ratings of services/artifacts, but in terms of the combinations of people and artifacts that they bring together. We present an algorithmic framework drawn from random graph theory and outline an analysis for one particular form of jump called a `hammock.' Experimental results on two datasets collected over the Internet demonstrate the validity of this approach.

Jumping Connections: A Graph-Theoretic Model for Recommender Systems [PDF]

Here we'll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill policy-making, technical standards development and technological innovation that create -- and will recreate -- the networked world as we know it. Translating legalese and technical language into plain English, we'll keep you updated on battles and decisions likely to impact the technology industry, talking to key players to help us understand not only the underlying forces shaping these decisions but also what they actually mean. Among the topics we'll touch on: intellectual property conflicts, technical architecture and innovation, the evolution of copyright, private vs. public interests in Net policy-making, lobbying and the law, and more.

Copyfight: Intellectual Property Law, Politics and Technology on the Net

Reed Hundt warns: "70% of Internet traffic, 30% of consumer long distance, and 50% of corporate communications crosses the Worldcom network. Worldcom is the most important Internet company in the world."

Worst. Scandal. Ever.

Bah. This simple fraud is a sidebar to the real story, which is that the global telecom industry is in the midst of collapse.

Recipe for death (of an industry): 1) Initiate hemorrhaging. 2) Allow to clot. 3) Repeat.

WorldCom Facing Charges of Fraud; Bush Vows Inquiry

In March 2001, I recommended an earlier revision of this paper to readers of the fadori mailing list, saying, "Interesting thoughts on reputation systems, collaborative filtering, content annotation for virtual communities, and more ..."

The latest version of the paper, logged here, will appear in the upcoming July 2002 edition of First Monday.

Going public?

Abstract: Shared opinions drive society: what we read, how we vote, and where we shop are all heavily influenced by the choices of others. However, the cost in time and money to systematically share opinions remains high, while the actual performance history of opinion generators is often not tracked.

This article explores the development of a distributed open opinion layer, which is given the generic name of TOOL. Similar to the evolution of IP as an underlying layer for many computational tasks, we suggest that all open opinion layers can conceptually be merged into a single underlying TOOL layer that will become a common substrate upon which many scientific, commercial, and social activities will be based.

Valuation decisions are ubiquitous in human interaction and thought itself. Incorporating information valuation into a computational layer will be as significant a step forward as our current communication and information retrieval layers.

TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer