Category: universe

As a followup to my last entry on search, MIT Technology Review discusses a few more search algorithms currently being sported by new entrants in the search engine battles.

Teoma: Similar pageranking system to Google, but concentrates on links highlighted by related “community” sites as being the “authority” on the topic at hand.

Mooter: Displays groups or “clusters” of topics related to the user’s search request. That way, the user can drill down to more specific results. User modeling is used to personalize and calibrate future search requests.

Dipsie: Utilizes a more advanced spider that can navigate forms and database interfaces, giving it the ability to crawl documents otherwise inaccessible.

AskMSR: To bring more eyeballs to MSN, MS needs better search. AskMSR uses fuzzy logic to answer natural language questions. It searches the web to give a shortlist of hypothetical answers. (It reminds me of the “ask the audience” lifeline in “Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire”)

Stuff I’ve Seen: A tried and true (if monopolistic) MS tactic: integrate search into Windows. Will display all items off your hard drive and the Internet (Office documents, appointments, addressbook contacts, webpages) related to the current topic you are working on (replying to email, drafting a presentation, writing an essay).

John Battelle offers some remarks.

Silverstein has a pretty good point – the cost of switching from one search to another is nil. I started off liking WebCrawler, shortly by AltaVista (when DEC was still around! Time flies.). I switched to Infoseek in 1998 shortly after AltaVista banned all Geocities sites. I was an early adopter of Google, and am still using it to this day. With no barriers to entry, I’m guessing things will be very different in five years.

I think that motivational business books are a bit of a guilty pleasure for executives – they are fully of ambiguous, high-level, feel-good concepts and witticisms, yet they don’t carry the loser stigma of self-help literature.

So I read FISH! Tales: Real Life Stories to Help You Transform Your Workplace and Your Life. It is a well-written, charming book written in the style of Reader’s Digest; four workplace testimonials are separated by “inspirational” one paragraph blurbs. Their concept of achieving satisfaction at work is to be like the fishmongers of Seattle’s Pike Place Market: loosen up and be positive. Then, as the book says, making money and winning customers will come naturally.

Personally, I have been at the Pike Place tourist trap, and while the fish throwing ritual was amusing to watch, I did not experience a joyous epiphany like FISH! authors did (as their DVD movie trailer attests). Then again, the whole FISH! philosophy is all about state of mind – you can either choose to be miserable and inert, or happy and adaptable.

So it all boils down to intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation – you can essentially bribe employees with more salaries to stay at their jobs, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be more satisfied with their jobs. So FISH! suggests that managers cut some slack, and try to make their employees understand they’re here by choice, not by force.

But will it really work?

The major issue (and everyone knows this) is that there’s nothing management won’t do to save a buck. They don’t really give a crap about their employees’ wellbeing. Let me be more specific: a company will give a crap up to a certain point – that point being a potentially catastrophic degradation in work performance. However, if, say, removing the water cooler will save them $200 a year, they’ll do it. It may make you slightly less happy, but happiness cannot be quantified – but money can. And managers are awarded for meeting budgets, not for making their workers content.

Eventually, things start slipping toward a Dilbert dystopia, an the kneejerk reaction is to generate more corporate rules, or increase micromanagement. Maybe a work quality improvement initiative will be started; there’s a pep rally, posters are put up, everyone gets a coffee mug or keychain with the Inspirational Slogan du jour, and then everything simply continues on just like before.

Take one of the motivational programs I was involved in a few years ago. If it was deemed that you went beyond the call of duty, you got a pack of Tic-tacs. However, you may still be stuck in a dead-end monotonous job. Rather than improving the quality of your work, you are probably now paranoid about the quality of your breath. Curiously-strong breath mints don’t retain employees.

How do you find an answer in a sea of data? What would be the most painless way? You’d go ask someone who might know, right?

But now we’re in the Information Age. We don’t have to suffer and sift through card catalogs at the local library. Or buy stacks of encyclopedias from a creepy salesman. We have Google. You can simply type your question into Google, and it will spit out a litany of possible results in in some absurdly short interval of time. It’s fast and accurate.

Sometimes.

How does Google know you are looking for information on sequoia trees, instead of the Toyota Sequoia? How can it understand common sense queries? How are we going to build the search tools of the future?

The key, some believe, is user modeling. The development of an intelligent agent that observes what your interests are and the way you think, and estimates what you would want to search for. To borrow a term from Frank Herbert’s Dune, a mentat.

In a way, Google already compensates for its artificial intelligence by harnessing the power of human minds. Google merely observes how us humans build our websites and link to others. Using this kind of citation analysis, Google knows what are the most popular sites.

Techno-profiling is still very crude. It is still doesn’t understand natural language. It needs to learn some common sense. “The Web needs to go through the infantile process of self-discovery. The Web doesn’t really understand itself. There’s lots of information on the Web, but not much “information about information,” also known as “metadata.””

Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. are tackling the same issue with a research tool called Project Halo. A “Digital Aristotle”, filled with scientific information, that can respond to natural language queries. Unfortunately, like that guy you used to know in university with a photographic memory, it’s doing well when asked to simply regurgitate data from its memory banks, still having problems understanding application-based questions.

It also suffers from the age old problem of content quality. It’s first prototype failed because it wasn’t taught chemistry correctly.

The first stage of developing IP (intellectual property, not to be confused with that other IP thingy) consists of various “defensive” tactics, notable the tedious and confusing act of tracking existing patents. Obviously, if someone else has already patented something very similar to your invention, there is no point to continue on working on it. Not only that, but patent lawsuits are lengthy, expensive affairs. Ignorance isn’t an excuse that holds up well in court, either.

This means inventors have to sift through the records of the patent office. You can do it at, say, the US Patent Office for free, but it’s a pain. Most major corporations use a company called Delphion to handle all “prior art” searches. Two online IP databases have also appeared.

On a semi-related note, let’s consider the infamous SCO infringement lawsuit against the Linux community – and by extension, Linux’s corporate backers, such as the very large IBM, who, having more patents than most countries, is no stranger to intellectual capital management. At the moment, SCO has not produced any compelling evidence to back their claims that Linux contains proprietary code from SCO Unix. They have as much credibility as those guys from Yemen who claim they own Mars. So they are either very sure of themselves, or very dumb.

“At one point, McBride, explaining what he thinks is the Linux community’s efforts to damage SCO through Web site attacks, asked a student whether he was affected by the MyDoom.A e-mail virus, which targeted Outlook and Outlook Express users and installed malicious code used to launch a massive distributed denial of service attack [on SCO’s website].

“The student replied with a hint of humor in his tone: ‘No, I have Linux.'”

– from SCO Receives Poisonous Reception at Ivy

“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention…Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements.

“I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labor, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be worst of idlers. Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life — energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.

“I do not rush into actual work…I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind. It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. There is scarcely a subject that cannot be mathematically treated and the effects calculated or the results determined beforehand from the available theoretical and practical data. The carrying out into practice of a crude idea as is being generally done is, I hold, nothing but a waste of energy, money and time.”

– Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

It is the conceptualization and realization of an idea that requires the most effort; the prototyping and manufacture is, while physically demanding, quite straightforward.

“When I was a freshly appointed instructor, I met a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension. I was sorry for a man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science-in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat at the very center of the glow.

“In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery…I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the ‘growing edge’; the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead. But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and come greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree?…The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leafs themselves their meaning.

“There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. ‘If I have seen further than other men,’ said Isaac Newton, ‘it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.’ And to learn that which goes before does not detract from the beauty of a scientific discovery but, rather, adds to it; just as the gradual unfolding of a flower, as seen by time-lapse photography, is more wonderful than the mature flower itself, caught in stasis.”

– Isaac Asimov, Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science

Invention is based on past work. The study of past and current findings is the source of future discoveries.

“According to Pentagon sources, the five-foot-three, 100-pound Lynch, who made a name for herself earlier this year when she fought to the death several hundred Iraqi doctors and nurses and performed open heart surgery on herself when she was injured, was among the 200 soldiers conducting manoeuvres near the former dictator’s home town of Tikrit when she said she “had a feeling” that they might find something of importance at a farm in the town of Adwar.”

Bell has announced that their residential ADSL service, Sympatico High Speed, will be powered by Lucent DSLAMs and RSLAMs from now on.

It’s a bit surprising, as the current ADSL platform is currently run on Alcatel equipment, and some of stuff is brand new. Bell has just finished purging the last dregs of their old Nortel DBIC equipment.

The Stinger FS+ will replace the Alcatel DSLAMs in the COs, and the Stinger remotes will replace the existing RSLAMs. NaviAccess is management software for the machinery. At the very least, the Stingers are denser boxes (the FS+ has 13,000 subscriber ports), so Bell can increase their user capacity without wasting more space.

It appears this change is in line with the Next Generation Network Bell is currently building. It’s still a few years away, but DSLAMs are not the only things Bell is buying from the Big Red Circle – the AnyPath messaging system closely follows Bell’s intent to have a rugged VoIP infrastructure. With AnyPath, you can play back your voicemail, faxes, SMS messages and email from a phone, computer or wireless PDA. (Bell is also interested in video-on-demand – Microsoft’s IPTV digital television technology is currently on trial.)

So change is good, and embrace the new hotness.

Who in the telcommunications world is driving innovation?

Last Wednesday, Sprint Canada proudly announced they have just launched Canada’s Sprint first IP Enabled Solution.

To them, I have to say, welcome to 1999.

1999 is when Bell Canada introduced IP enabled solutions and a fully-optical IP network. They were the first ones to do so in North America, let alone Canada.

2000 was when Bell Canada officially introduced their IP VPN service running Cisco MPLS. Sprint Canada pledges to launch their MPLS network in 2005.

2001 was when Bell Canada introduced Bandwidth on Demand; with a few clicks of a mouse on a web portal, a customer can go from 20Mbps to 40Mbps within less than a day.

2002 was when Bell Canada introduced VoIP solutions to complement the QoS-saavy MPLS network.

2003 was when Bell Canada introduced managed IP security and hosted telephony solutions to customers.

Looking forward, Bell Canada, Aliant, Bell West and Nortel Networks has recently pledged to invest $200 million to build their Next Generation Network. I’m thrilled about this, because we’re about to really eat our own dogfood now; the NGN will be more robust and flexible than any other data network ever introduced. The plan is to migrate over to VoIP, and maintain voice carrier-grade reliability.

It will be converged, with voice and multimedia on a single network. Customers will be able to make video calls. Unified messaging will become closer to reality. With a single ID such as an email address, you will be able to ring up someone’s office phone, cellphone, computer and PDA all at once.

So by 2006, one year after Sprint launches their “revolutionary” network, Bell will have already moved on to something even better. As Sprint is just dipping its toes in the pool, Bell has already hit the showers.

Who in the telcommunications world is driving innovation?

The CRTC pledges to work in the best interest of customers. However, are they punishing the ILECs and coddling the competitors in the process? Lawrence Surtees, a senior IDC analyst, raised this possibility today.

First, we have a series of CRTC decisions to keep the ILEC prices above those of the CLECs. Personally, I find these CLECs often lack technical expertise, customer service, and service breadth. They also often don’t own the networks they are selling, being content reselling the ILEC’s wire wholesale. And thanks for the CRTC, these wholesale prices are often bargains. Regardless, many major competitors went bankrupt last year.

However, thanks to bankruptcy protection, these CLECs have become born-again, and given a clean slate on debt to return with a vengeance – the Company Formerly Known as AT&T Canada, Allstream, Call-Net Enterprises (Sprint Canada), and 360 Networks/Groupe Telecom. Together, they wrote off over 18.8 billion dollars in debt. But this raises a question: if these companies can defy death and just blow off bad credit, why do they need regulations to stay alive?

Second, we have the other fighters hiding in the wings, that the CRTC will be unwilling and unable to regulate, and probably not even aware they exist. As networking equipment becomes more commoditized, the profit margins will come from design, consulting, and support services. System integrators become major competitors in the IT field. Why else would IBM buy PwC Consulting and fold it into its IBM Global Services system integration division? Then you have the Internet ISPs and wireless carriers, eager to gobble up new access markets.

And then you have the threat of newer tech. Hydro companies are determined to provide networking over powerlines with hydro telecoms, and the monopolistic cable companies are busy launching two-way interactive digital cable systems. These two new technologies could be available in five years. And then you have your usual set of suspects such as Bell, Aliant and Telus, ILECs in their own provinces seeking new territories to dominate.

Competition benefits the customer by reducing prices. However, Canada already enjoys some of the lowest telecom prices in the world. Are regulations in place just for competition’s sake alone?