"This paper analyzes the pricing of transit traffic in wireless peer-to-peer networks using the concepts of direct and indirect network externalities. We first establish that without any pricing mechanism, congestion externalities overwhelm other network effects in a wireless data network. We show that peering technology will mitigate the congestion and allow users to take advantage of more the positive network externalities. However, without pricing, the peering equilibrium breaks down just like a bucket brigade made up of free-riding agents. With pricing and perfect competition, a peering equilibrium is possible and allows many more users on the network at the same time. However, the congestion externality is still a problem, so peering organized through a club may be the best solution."

Pricing and Network Externalities in Peer-to-Peer Communications Networks

Intel is turning to former DARPA researcher Dave Tennenhouse to move beyond the clock-speed race with AMD. He wants Intel to take risks and pursue smart dust, personal area networks, and "proactive" (aka ubiquitous or pervasive) computing. It looks like Intel may be beginning to hedge its bets in case the folks at Bell Labs (and elsewhere, presumably) can't commoditize molecular electronics within the next few years.

Corporate Techies Pursue Disruptive Technologies

Papers of interest from an upcoming conference, to be held in Japan on October 23-26:

Knowledge Is Power: The Semantic Web Vision
Social Networks on the Web and in the Enterprise
Emerging Topic Tracking System
Dynamic Expert Group Models for Recommender Systems
The ABC's of Online Community
Collecting, Visualizing, and Exchanging Personal Interests and Experiences in Communities
Discovering Seeds of New Interest Spread from Premature Pages Cited by Multiple Communities
Collaborative Filtering Using Principal Component Analysis and Fuzzy Clustering
An Adaptive Recommendation System with a Coordinator Agent
Discovery of Emerging Topics between Communities on WWW

LNAI 2198: Web Intelligence: Research and Development

Fact Squad provides information from acknowledged and respected experts (many with decades of experience in their fields), not from vested interests attempting to skew available information regarding these topics exclusively for their own betterment."

Fact Squad

Lexant: The technology at the heart of the MindfulEye suite of services is an artificial intelligence system called Lexant. [L]earn how Lexant reads and understands online discussion to turn raw Internet data into actionable information."

MindfulEye.com: The World Talks. We Listen.

"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

"The fight for the future is not between the armies of leading states, nor are its weapons those of traditional armed forces. Rather, the combatants come from bomb-making terrorist groups like Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, or drug smuggling cartels like those in Colombia and Mexico. On the positive side are civil-society activists fighting for the environment, democracy and human rights. What all have in common is that they operate in small, dispersed units that can deploy anywhere, anytime to penetrate and disrupt. They all feature network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. And, from the Intifadah to the drug war, they are proving very hard to beat."

Just published on October 16. Printed copies not yet available in stores, but you can download the text in PDF. The authors recently published a related article in First Monday.

Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

The long-awaited "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty" will be in stores on November 14.
Until then, check out this latest trailer (only available in Microsoft ASF). (This 4 minute, 25 second video is hosted from Japan, so US users will want to dowload the file rather than stream it.)

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

The Sunday New York Times reviews the latest offering from Audi, with a special focus on one of the first high-performance vehicles with a continuously variable transmission (CVT).

A New Installation for the Audi Sculpture Garden

The 220-hp 2002 Audi A4 introduces the Audi multitronic Continuously Variable Transmission (although it is not immediately available with quattro AWD).

2002 Audi A4 3.0 [PDF]