Every weekday afternoon some 20 mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists gather in the Seattle suburbs to share tea.

Graph Theory and Teatime

We introduce an automatic configuration mechanism that generates the most relevant information to be presented to limited attention users of information-rich media. It also guarantees to maximize their total expected utility from the information they receive. A computationally efficient algorithm is used to assign an index value to each information item, which then determines whether or not a given item appears in the top list presented to users at a given time.

The Economics of Attention: Maximizing User Value in Information Rich Environments

Decius wrote:

I think it's inevitable that as people find this kind of technology useful for fun they'll bring it into the office. See Jello's MemeStream...

The story here is not that businesses are starting to become interested in social networking technologies.

The story is that Cisco now finds it to be an important part of their business strategy.

The story here is not what this action says about social networking, but rather what it says about routers and switches.

RE: Social Networking’s Next Phase

possibly noteworthy wrote:

Are you ready to pay $100 a month for residential access to the Internet?

Decius replied:

No, but issuing IP addresses based on geographic location is LONG overdue.

That isn't going to fix things.

Report from the IAB Workshop on Routing and Addressing

Workshop participants concluded that the so-called locator/identifier overload" of the IP address semantics is one of the causes of the routing scalability problem as we see today. Thus a "split" seems necessary to scale the routing system, although how to actually architect and implement such a split was not explored in detail.

... All identifier/locator split proposals require a mapping service that can return a set of locators corresponding to a given identifier. In addition, these proposals must also address the problem of detecting locator failures and redirecting data flows to remaining locators for a multihomed site.

The locator-identifier split represents a fundamental architectural issue and IAB should lead the investigation into understanding of both how to make this architectural change and the overall impact of the change.

See also, Brief Update on The IAB Routing and Addressing Workshop:

deaggregation, multihoming, traffic engineering, power hunger and heat death; "a solution to id/loc split might help solve multihoming and mobility";

Need to find ways to a sustainable future rather than point fixes
The power issue is serious
What if we do try to untangle identities and locators?

Workshop on Locator/Identifier Split

The locator/identifier split is actually a far-reaching change to the Internet architecture, with many tendrils.

Do we need a new network model?

Who Are You? Identity and Location in IP, by Geoff Huston, APNIC

RE: Looming Issues in Internet Architecture

Indica was fixated on my friend Ari. I asked her what kind of phone she had.

“A Sidekick,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s the same kind Brianna has.”

“Strippers’ phone of choice,” she said.

Robert's Steak House Restaurant Review | NYT

We covered FutureMAP here, back in the day.

In 2001, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) started experimenting with methods for applying market-based concepts to intelligence. One such project, DARPA’s Future Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) program tested whether prediction markets, markets in which people bet on the likelihood of future events, could be used to improve upon existing approaches to preparing strategic intelligence. The program was cancelled in the summer of 2003 under a barrage of congressional criticism. Senators Ron Wyden and Byron Dorgan accused the Pentagon of wasting taxpayer dollars on “terrorism betting parlors,” and that “Spending millions of dollars on some kind of fantasy league terror game is absurd and, frankly, ought to make every American angry.”

Americans need not have been angry about FutureMAP. It was neither a terrorism betting parlor nor a fantasy league. Rather, it was an experiment to see whether market-generated predictions could improve upon conventional approaches to forecasting. Since 1988, traders in the Iowa Electronic Markets have been betting with remarkable accuracy on the likely winner of the US presidential elections. Eli Lilly, a major pharmaceutical company, found that prediction markets outdid conventional methods in forecasting outcomes of drug research and development efforts. Google recently announced that it was using prediction markets to “forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance.”

Isn't it ironic that the mob was so wrong about prediction markets? FutureMAP should have anticipated that reaction.

The decision to cancel FutureMAP was at the very least premature, if not wrong-headed. The bulk of evidence on prediction markets demonstrate that they are reliable aggregators of disparate and dispersed information and can result in forecasts that are more accurate than those of experts. If so, prediction markets can substantially contribute to US Intelligence Community strategic and tactical intelligence work.

Using Prediction Markets to Enhance US Intelligence Capabilities

An automated monitoring service downloads image files (including, e.g., graphic and video files) and audio files from various Internet sites, and checks these files for the presence of embedded digital watermark data. When found, such data is decoded and used to identify the proprietor of each watermarked file. The proprietors are alerted to the results of the monitoring operation, often apprising such proprietors of unknown distribution of their image/video/audio properties.

This is being associated with YouTube. It also ties in with other recent discussions here.

Method for monitoring internet dissemination of image, video and/or audio files | US Patent 7171016

Check back next week for full text online, or pick up a copy at the newsstand.

Herding the Mob
Online recommendation systems are growing up - and the blackhats are moving in.
By Annalee Newitz
Coming 3/1/2007

Be More Than You Can Be
DARPA has developed some of the coolest weaponry for the US military. Now it's going to upgrade the soldiers themselves.
By Noah Shachtman
Coming 3/9/2007

Meanwhile, check out the interview with Tony Tether.

Wired Magazine Issue 15.03

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a low cost and potentially covert method of remotely retrieving stored information. Broad recent growth of RFID applications, especially in the retail sector, has raised several specific privacy and data protection concerns derived from the potential that RFID offers for surreptitious monitoring and the linking of personal and obscure or private information into large databases. The result of these concerns has been an active policy debate, with legislative proposals at the U.S. state and federal levels, as well as in Europe. The author first constructs a qualitative framework for analyzing these policies, which provides a description of the key stakeholders in the debate and the issues concerning each. He then develops a simple economic model showing that all the assessed policies involve substantial tradeoffs in firms’ and individual behaviors and that a true understanding of uncertainties such as market structure and individual preferences about privacy is critical in assessing the impact of any policy.

RFID in the Retail Sector: A Methodology for Analysis of Policy Proposals and Their Implications for Privacy, Economic Efficiency and Security

This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization