At first glance, American patriotism seems a simple matter. But it is simple only until one actually starts to think about it, inquire after its sources, and investigate its manifestations. [...]"

This article appears in the Fall 2001 issue of _The Public Interest_, a journal about which Francis Fukuyama has said:

"When the intellectual history of the late twentieth century America is written, scholars will point to the large impact that a small journal, The Public Interest, has had in shaping the course of American public policy, on issues from crime to welfare to education. No other magazine has had a comparable effect in keeping the social sciences honest."

America: Idea or Nation?

I've known about this for a while, and it's certainly not a new publication, but it has some relevance to ongoing discussions.

"Abstract: Conventional software systems, such as those based on the "desktop metaphor," are ill-equipped to manage the electronic information and events of the typical computer user. We introduce a new metaphor, Lifestreams, for dynamically organizing a user's personal workspace. Lifestreams uses a simple organizational metaphor, a time-ordered stream of documents, as an underlying storage system. Stream filters are used to organize, monitor and summarize information for the user. Combined, they provide a system that subsumes many separate desktop applications. This paper describes the Lifestreams model and our prototype system."

Lifestreams: A Storage Model for Personal Data - Eric Freeman, David Gelernter

Anderson describes how we are entering an "age of open systems" as systems of all kinds - organizations, nations, ecosystems - change in similar ways. Boundaries around systems are penetrated, challenged, renegotiated, relocated. Systems that were once relatively isolated develop new connections and linkages to other systems. Anderson argues that this globalizing world is radically "uncentralized" even though people and societies are richly interconnected. All Together Now shows how globalization is advanced even by anti-globalization movements, while global-scale problems such as climate change draw us together into the first global civilization."

All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization

Autonomic Computing: The IBM [Research] Perspective on the State of Information Technology

"The information technology boom can only explode for so long before it collapses on itself in a jumble of wires, buttons and knobs. IBM knows that increasing processor might, storage capacity and network connectivity must report to some kind of systemic authority if we expect to take advantage of its potential. The human body's self-regulating nervous system presents an excellent model for creating the next generation of computing, autonomic computing. "

There are many others also working on autonomic computing, but IBM has neatly summarized the field in a handy list of eight important goals.

IBM's Manifesto on Autonomic Computing

"OPION, Inc. discovers and forecasts emerging patterns and trends by identifying and ranking opinion leaders in digital public discussions and correlating their behavior with real-world events. When change is increasingly driven by chaotic public discussions, Opion spots important events at their earliest stages, then tracks and predicts their spread and impact. We find the people with the most contagious ideas, while preserving each individual's privacy."

Opion.com: Capturing the voice of electronic communities

"Managing trust is a problem of particular importance in peer-to-peer environments as one encounters frequently unknown agents. Existing methods for trust management based on reputation do however not scale as they rely on some form of central database or global knowledge to be maintained at each agent. In this paper we illustrate that the problem needs to be addressed at both the data management and the semantic, i.e. trust management, level and we devise a method of how trust assessments can be performed by using at both levels scalable peer-to-peer mechanisms. We expect that such methods are an important factor if fully decentralized peer-to-peer systems should become the platform for more serious applications than simple file exchange."

Managing Trust in a Peer to Peer Information System [PDF]

"Peer-To-Peer systems are driving a major paradigm shift in the era of genuinely distributed computing. Gnutella is a good example of a Peer-To-Peer success story: a rather simple software enables Internet users to freely exchange files, such as MP3 music files. But it shows up also some of the limitations of current P2P information systems with respect to their ability to manage data efficiently. In this paper we introduce P-Grid, a scalable access structure that is specifically designed for Peer-To-Peer information systems. P-Grids are constructed and maintained by using randomized algorithms strictly based on local interactions, provide reliable data access even with unreliable peers, and scale gracefully both in storage and communication cost."

P-Grid: A self-organizing access structure for P2P information systems [PDF]

"Abstract: Recommendation systems are applied to personalize and customize the Web environment. We have developed a recommendation system, termed Yoda, that is designed to support large-scale Web-based applications requiring highly accurate recommendations in real-time. With Yoda, we introduce a hybrid approach that combines collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based querying to achieve higher accuracy. Yoda is structured as a tunable model that is trained off-line and employed for real-time recommendation on-line. The on-line process benefits from an optimized aggregation function with low complexity that allows real-time weighted aggregation of the soft classification of active users to predefned recommendation sets. Leveraging on localized distribution of the recommendable items, the same aggregation function is further optimized for the off-line process to reduce the time complexity of constructing the pre-defined recommendation sets of the model. To make the off-line process scalable furthermore, we also propose a filtering mechanism, FLSH, that extends the Locality Sensitive Hashing technique by incorporating a novel distance measure that satisfies specific requirements of our application. Our end-to-end experiments show while Yoda's complexity is low and remains constant as the number of users and/or items grow, its accuracy surpasses that of the basic nearest-neighbor method by a wide margin (in most cases more than 100%)."

Yoda: An Accurate and Scalable Web-based Recommendation System [PDF]

"Multiscale computing (MSC) involves the computation, manipulation, and analysis of information at different resolution levels. Widespread use of MSC algorithms and the discovery of important relationships between different approaches to implementation were catalyzed, in part, by the recent interest in wavelets. We present two examples that demonstrate how MSC can help scientists understand complex data. The first is from acoustical signal processing and the second is from computer graphics."

This is a preprint edition of an article set to appear in a future issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Seciences (www.pnas.org). Full text is available in HTML and PDF. Authors include researchers from IBM Tokyo Research, NTT, and Bell Labs.

Multiscale Computing

Researchers from Lucent's Bell Labs repeort on the latest progress towards molecular-scale electronics. The article appears in the October 18 issue of _Nature_.

"The use of individual molecules as functional electronic devices was proposed in 1974 (ref. 1). Since then, advances in the field of nanotechnology have led to the fabrication of various molecule devices and devices based on monolayer arrays of molecules. Single molecule devices are expected to have interesting electronic properties, but devices based on an array of molecules are easier to fabricate and could potentially be more reliable. However, most of the previous work on array-based devices focused on two-terminal structures: demonstrating, for example, negative differential resistance, rectifiers, and re-configurable switching. It has also been proposed that diode switches containing only a few two-terminal molecules could be used to implement simple molecular electronic computer logic circuits. However, three-terminal devices, that is, transistors, could offer several advantages for logic operations compared to two-terminal switches, the most important of which is 'gain'?the ability to modulate the conductance. Here, we demonstrate gain for electronic transport perpendicular to a single molecular layer ( ~ 10?20 angstroms) by using a third gate electrode. Our experiments with field-effect transistors based on self-assembled monolayers demonstrate conductance modulation of more than five orders of magnitude. In addition, inverter circuits have been prepared that show a gain as high as six. The fabrication of monolayer transistors and inverters might represent an important step towards molecular-scale electronics."

Self-assembled monolayer organic field-effect transistors