The new economy may or may not materialise, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us shortly. In the developed world, and probably in the emerging countries as well, this new society will be a good deal more important than the new economy (if any). It will be quite different from the society of the late 20th century, and also different from what most people expect. Much of it will be unprecedented. And most of it is already here, or is rapidly emerging."

The next society | The Economist, November 1

"As computing and communication capabilities have continued to increase, more and more activity is taking place at the edges of the network, typically in homes or on workers desktops. This trend has been demonstrated by the increasing popularity and usability of "peer-to-peer" systems such as Napster and Gnutella. Unfortunately, this popularity has quickly shown the limitations of these systems, particularly in terms of scale. Because the networks form in an ad-hoc manner, they typically make inefficient use of resources. We propose a mechanism, using only local knowledge, to improve the overall performance of peer-to-peer networks based on interests. Peers monitor which other peers frequently respond successfully to their requests for information. When a peer is discovered to frequently provide good results, the peer attempts to move closer to it in the network by creating a new connection with that peer. This leads to clusters of peers with similar interests, and in turn allows us to limit the depth of searches required to find good results. We have implemented our algorithm in the context of a distributed encyclopedia-style information sharing application which is built on top of the gnutella network. In our testing environment, we have shown the ability to greatly reduce the amount of communication resources required to find the desired articles in the encyclopedia."

Finding Good Peers in Peer-to-Peer Networks

This research paper was published in 2000 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Why did Sony allow this work, yet recently take action to stop other amateur modifications of the Aibo robot?

"An evolutionary algorithm is used to evolve gaits with the Sony entertainment robot, AIBO. All processing is handled by the robot's on-board computer with individuals evaluated using the robot's hardware. By sculpting the experimental environment, we increase robustness to different surface types and different AIBOs. Evolved gaits are faster than those created by hand. Using this technique we evolve a gait used in the consumer version of AIBO. "

Also check out the following paper, published in the proceedings of the 1999 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Autonomous Evolution of Gaits with the Sony Quadruped Robot
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu:80/papers/hornby_gecco99_sony.pdf

"In this paper we report our results of autonomous evolution of dynamic gaits for the Sony Quadruped Robot."

Sony's selective enforcement on Aibo modifications?

"gnutellavision: Real Time Visualization of a Peer to Peer Network"

From Newsforge: "a Python program that connects to the Gnutella network and maps out connections between nodes in real time, written by a group of students at U.C. Berkeley."

gnutellavision: intro

A generation ago, a communications scholar named Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote "Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age." Pool's book predicted a future of interconnected computers. ... networked computers would become the platform for new forms ... Pool also predicted that established players would resist this change. ... Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor, picks up this story of the present resisting the future in "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World," a highly readable and deeply engaging sequel to his "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace." In "The Future of Ideas," Lessig also sees dominant players exercising control through the law, technical standards and political might to resist the change that might otherwise take place."

EPIC's Mark Rotenberg reviews Larry Lessig's new book.

Internet liberation theology

This is a draft (10/26 2001) of Part I of The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. Parts II through V have been made available since then, with Part V just coming online November 3.

_The Emotion Machine_ is an upcoming book. It was originally scheduled to be in stores by now, but there were obviously some delays. Here is a preview, anyway.

You will find Parts II through V online at

http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb2.html
http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb3.html
http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb4.html
http://www.media.mit.edu:80/people/minsky/E2/eb5.html

Marvin Minsky's _The Emotion Machine_

Modern science is accustomed to bigness. In five years, the world's most powerful particle accelerator will be in operation at the CERN physics laboratory outside Geneva. The $4 billion accelerator will give physicists the tools they need to search for scientific prizes like the elusive Higgs boson, a particle believed to be the origin of mass and weight in the universe. Scientists will collaborate remotely using the Grid Physics Network [...]"

Katie Hafner's article quotes Michael Schrage of the MIT Media Lab and refers to JCR Licklider from ARPA of yore, David Gerlernter of Yale, Ian Foster of U. Chicago, and others. They discuss the way that collaborative computing tools are changing the conduct of science and business across and around the world.

Machine-Made Links Change the Way Minds Can Work Together

"This paper deals with "Napster Music Community," a program that connects 60 million of music fans and enables them to exchange music files. The main hypothesis is that Napster is an example of an imagined and network community. The first section of the paper gives a theoretical background to the problems addressed: the notions of community and network, the concepts of imagined and network community, as well as the debate on virtual communities are extensively discussed there. Pundits such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim, Benedict Anderson, Barry Wellman, Morris Janowitz, Robert Putnam and others are consulted. The third part of this paper consist firstly of an analysis of the Napster software that aims at demonstrating the structure for the actors to interact within, and secondly addresses 14 variables that have been distinguished as descriptive of an imagined and network community. In conclusion several implications from the research are drawn."

The Napster Music Community

An archive of historical DOE and military films, available in both MPEG and in streaming RealVideo. Includes video of the well-known test at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. At present, the archive contains 73 films from the 1940's through the 1970's.

Historical Nuclear Weapons Test Films

"Early on the morning of Saturday, October 20th, more than a hundred Army Rangers parachuted into a Taliban-held airbase sixty miles southwest of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. A military cameraman videotaped the action with the aid of a night-vision lens, and his grainy, green-tinted footage of determined commandos and billowing parachutes dominated the television news that night. The same morning, a second Special Operations unit, made up largely of Rangers and a reinforced Delta Force squadron, struck at a complex outside Kandahar which included a house used by Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader." [...]

A short piece by Seymour Hersh to appear in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker.

What happened when the Special Forces landed in Afghanistan? | The New Yorker