Abstract: "Considerable attention has been given to the legal implications arising from the distribution of music in a digital format via the Internet. However, less attention has been paid to the technological and social drivers of change in the music industry. This paper attempts to demonstrate the significant impact that social and technological forces have on the music industry, especially regarding lowering barriers to entry."

About: Mark Fox is Associate Professor of Management & Entrepreneurship in the School of Business & Economics at Indiana University South Bend.

Technological and Social Drivers of Change in the Online Music Industry | FM Feb 2002

"Featured seminars will include California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Timothy Muris, Author James Bamford, John Perry Barlow, State Senator Jackie Speier, Author Bruce Sterling, Ed Felten, John Podesta, and others."

Session topics include: cyberspace law, biometrics, crypto, privacy, national ID cards, FOIA, USA PATRIOT, elections, tools for community, open source, medical privacy, digital divide, DMCA, intellectual property, ICANN, P2P, international security, anonymity, and more.

Get this: DoubleClick is a CFP sponsor this year! (And: MSFT and AOLTW are patrons!)

Computers, Freedom & Privacy | CFP 2002

Full text of this MIT Press book is available online (in draft form).

Trust is the critical variable in Internet Commerce. Trust requirements differentiate Internet from other forms of commerce. Trust has three primary components: reliability, security, and privacy.

There is trust in routing, trust in encryption, and trust in applications. The layers of trust, the areas of risk, the power of cryptography, and the limits to security are all explained for the general audience in this text.

When a business obtains customer data, the customer trusts that the data are used to improve service for her, and not used in a manner that harms her. The business is not necessarily violating privacy but is certainly requiring some extension of trust from the customer. This book carefully examines that trust relationship and examines the types of data that are most immediately useful but the least used.

This book contains detailed explanations of fault tolerance and the components of reliability. Most transactions today are not fault tolerant. If a transaction is not reliable (in the sense of being fault tolerant) someone is at risk when the transaction fails. It is therefore important to be able to read a transaction-based Internet commerce standard and understand from that the risks involved in using the standard.

_Trust & Risk in Internet Commerce_ by L. Jean Camp

by Gregory J. Rattray. MIT Press, April 2001, ISBN 0-262-18209-2, 480 pages.

Dorothy Denning says: "This excellent analysis is essential reading for anyone concerned with the defense posture of the United States. All those with a stake in the security of the information infrastructure should read it. There is nothing else like it."

In the "information age," information systems may serve as both weapons and targets. Although the media have paid a good deal of attention to information warfare, most treatments so far are overly broad and without analytical foundations. In this book Gregory Rattray offers a comprehensive analysis of strategic information warfare waged via digital means as a distinct concern for the United States and its allies.

Rattray begins by analyzing salient features of information infrastructures and distinguishing strategic information warfare from other types of information-based competition, such as financial crime and economic espionage. He then establishes a conceptual framework for the successful conduct of strategic warfare in general, and of strategic information warfare in particular. Taking a historical perspective, he examines U.S. efforts to develop air bombardment capabilities in the period between World Wars I and II and compares them to U.S. efforts in the 1990s to develop the capability to conduct strategic information warfare. He concludes with recommendations for strengthening U.S. strategic information warfare defenses.

Strategic Warfare in Cyberspace

by Alex Roland and Philip Shiman. MIT Press, June 2002, ISBN 0-262-18226-2. 440 pages.

This is the story of an extraordinary effort by the U.S. Department of Defense to hasten the advent of "machines that think." From 1983 to 1993, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent an extra $1 billion on computer research aimed at achieving artificial intelligence. The Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI) was conceived as an integrated plan to promote computer chip design and manufacture, computer architecture, and artificial intelligence software. What distinguished SCI from other large-scale technology programs was that it self-consciously set out to advance an entire research front. The SCI succeeded in fostering significant technological successes, even though it never achieved machine intelligence. The goal provided a powerful organizing principle for a suite of related research programs, but it did not solve the problem of coordinating these programs. In retrospect, it is hard to see how it could have.

In Strategic Computing, Alex Roland and Philip Shiman uncover the roles played in the SCI by technology, individuals, and social and political forces. They explore DARPA culture, especially the information processing culture within the agency, and they evaluate the SCI?s accomplishments and set them in the context of overall computer development during this period. Their book is an important contribution to our understanding of the complex sources of contemporary computing.

Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993.

272 pages (April 2002), from Farrar Straus & Giroux; ISBN: 0374236437.

"What's at stake in tomorrow's biotech revolution: a definitive assessment from "a superior mind at work" (Robert Kaplan, Los Angeles Times Book Review)

"In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that the greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, Fukuyama now asks how the ability to modify human behavior will affect liberal democracy.

"To reorient contemporary debate, Fukuyama underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends" to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama persuasively argues that the ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution -- intervention in the "germ-line," the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendants -- will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to "improve" their children.

"In Our Posthuman Future , our greatest social philosopher begins to describe the potential effects of our exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature."

(As a side note: Fukuyama is now at Johns Hopkins University.)

_Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution_, by Francis Fukuyama

This report from scientists from the Santa Fe Institute and Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study will soon appear in PNAS.

Genetic mutations that lead to undetectable or minimal changes in phenotypes are said to reveal redundant functions. Redundancy is common among phenotypes of higher organisms that experience low mutation rates and small population sizes. Redundancy is less common among organisms with high mutation rates and large populations, or among the rapidly dividing cells of multicellular organisms. In these cases, one even observes the opposite tendency: a hypersensitivity to mutation, which we refer to as antiredundancy. In this paper we analyze the evolutionary dynamics of redundancy and antiredundancy. Assuming a cost of redundancy, we find that large populations will evolve antiredundant mechanisms for removing mutants and thereby bolster the robustness of wild-type genomes; whereas small populations will evolve redundancy to ensure that all individuals have a high chance of survival. We propose that antiredundancy is as important for developmental robustness as redundancy, and is an essential mechanism for ensuring tissue-level stability in complex multicellular organisms. We suggest that antiredundancy deserves greater attention in relation to cancer, mitochondrial disease, and virus infection.

Redundancy, antiredundancy, and the robustness of genomes

A team including scientists from the Santa Fe Institute writes in the Jan 22 issue of PNAS:

Evolutionary processes generating biodiversity and ecological mechanisms maintaining biodiversity seem to be diverse themselves. Conventional explanations of biodiversity such as niche differentiation, density-dependent predation pressure, or habitat heterogeneity seem satisfactory to explain diversity in communities of macrobial organisms such as higher plants and animals. For a long time the often high diversity among microscopic organisms in seemingly uniform environments, the famous "paradox of the plankton," has been difficult to understand. The biodiversity in bacterial communities has been shown to be sometimes orders of magnitudes higher than the diversity of known macrobial systems. Based on a spatially explicit game theoretical model with multiply cyclic dominance structures, we suggest that antibiotic interactions within microbial communities may be very effective in maintaining diversity.

Chemical warfare between microbes promotes biodiversity

Biophysics researchers at NYU write in the Jan 22 issue of PNAS:

RING domains act in a variety of essential cellular processes but have no general function ascribed to them. Here, we observe that purified arenaviral protein Z, constituted almost entirely by its RING domain, self-assembles in vitro into spherical structures that resemble functional bodies formed by Z in infected cells. By using a variety of biophysical methods we provide a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for the RING-dependent self-assembly of Z. Assembly appears coupled to substantial conformational reorganization and changes in zinc coordination of site II of the RING. Thus, the rate-limiting nature of conformational reorganization observed in the folding of monomeric proteins can also apply to the assembly of macromolecular scaffolds. These studies describe a unique mechanism of nonfibrillar homogeneous self-assembly and suggest a general function of RINGs in the formation of macromolecular scaffolds that are positioned to integrate biochemical processes in cells.

Full text requires subscription.

Self-assembly properties of a model RING domain | PNAS

Robert Frietas, a researcher at Zyvex and a former fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, writes in most recent issue of _Pathways_ magazine:

In just a few decades physicians could be sending tiny machines into our bodies to diagnose and cure disease. These nanodevices will be able to repair tissues, clean blood vessels and airways, transform our physiological capabilities, and even potentially counteract the aging process.

Nanomedicine: Robots in the bloodstream