Month: February 2003

Collective behavior of web services

In his account of a massive power grid failure, Duncan Watts writes:

"The trouble with systems like the power grid is that they are built up of many components whose individual behavior is reasonable well understood but whose collective behavior, like that of football crowds and stock market investors, can be sometimes orderly and somtimes chaotic, confusing, and even destructive." – Six Degrees, Duncan Watts

I believe there are similarities between power grids and web service networks that could result in catastrophic cascades of unplanned collective behaviors.  We need to understand the problems better and build safety mechanisms in and around each nodes and, most importantly, key web service nodes such as those that bridges web service network clusters.  Web service orchestration problems are just the tip of the iceberg.  Who can claim to fully understand the problems of echos, oscillations, cascades, and bottlenecks inherent in a large network of web services?

Mok3 is Nice

Mok3 is currently showing their stuff at the Demo conference.  I really like it.  Essentially, it creates 3D scenes from photographs, like turning picture postcards into 3D popout cards.  Technology behind it is fairly obvious but meshed and polished to form a neat tool.  Nice.

Digital Identies in the Small World

I went out this morning and bought a copy of Duncan Watts' Six Degrees because I wanted to catch up with the latest on the Small World phenomenon, particularly in respect to digital identity.  While there is a resurgence of interests over the result of Stanley Milgram's experiment known as "Six Degrees of Separation", there hasn't been much discussion over how it applies to the digital identity problem domain.  I think a robust self-organizing and fully distributed web of trust can be built using the Small World phenomenon.  Relative success of PGP over PKI serves as a good indication that this approach deserves further study.

Here are some links to (very) few papers related to this.  Note that these are recent (2001-2003) papers.

Small Worlds in Security Systems: an Analysis of the PGP Certificate Graph
IP6 – Self-Organized Public Key Management for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

While my searches were mostly fruitless, I did run across an intriguing software named Six Degrees that offers some aspects of Universal Personal Proxy functionalities.  It monitors e-mail traffic as well as desktop user activities to help the user find e-mail messages and files related to the currently selected object (called Focus).  I like its use of the word Focus and how it integrates with Windows and Outlook.  Its abuse of drag and drop was not, however.  Check out an animated tour of Six Degrees here.

XACML 1.0 Approved

XACML is now an OASIS Open Standard.  XACML, which stands for eXtensible Access Control Markup Language, is an XML spec for encoding information access policies.  XACML 1.0 was approved as of today (Feb. 18) and can be found here in Word format (PDF version is not yet available).  I plan to read it in detail and repot my findings here later.

Robotic News Anchors

News of K-Bot, an android prototype with a wide range of facial capabilities, made me realize that we will soon see robotic news anchors delivering news 24 hours a day.  At first, novelty will encourage some underdog news organizations — like that crazy Russian newstation with stripping news anchor — to experiment with bots as talking heads.  Voice and face expression hints can be provided by a cheap 'reader'.  Ultimately, it will be cost saving.  Why pay big bucks to hire wrinkly Barbara Walters when you can buy a sexiest looking custom-made-in-Hollywood android news anchors for Barbara's one month salary?  If audience gets bored, just order a new one.

Come to think of it, why do we need robots anyway when we can use computer generated graphics in realtime?  You can even use famous heads like Julia Roberts or Michael Jackson.  I want the Three Stooges co-anchoring my 6 o'clock news.  Bush can do the weather and make akward jokes.

What is with Korean politicians and Hoover Institution?

[I'll end the day with another dose of Korea related post.]  For some reason, Korean politicians visit Hoover Institution whenever they lose a Presidential Election.  This time, its two: Hwae-Chang Lee and Mong-Joon Jung.

Mr. Jung is a son of the founder of Hyundai and a Vice President of FIFA, the organization behind WorldCup.  At one point, he led int he polls, but lost out to Moo-Hyun No in an informal poll-based runoff to unify candidacy against Hwae-Chang Lee.  He helped Mr. No until the last hours and then quit because he was upset with Mr. No.  Needless to say, he became a laughing stock the next day when the Presidential Election results came in.  Mr. Jung is supposedly going to Hoover Institution to do some research into Asian politic.

Mr. Lee was the former leader of Han-Na-Ra-Dang, the conservative party in Korea with a large majority over others.  He is a prosecutor turned politician with a striking lack of charisma.  Still, everyone expected him to win until the few weeks of the Election.  After losing, Mr. Lee also announced that he is going to Hoover Institution to do research.

My opinion is that Korean politicians are using the Hoover Institution as a sort of political bandage or medal.  I don't know what kind of research Hoover Institution is doing on Korea, but I have yet to come across a useful Hoover report related to Korea.  Hey, if you Hoover guys want to do research about Korean politic, try going there to smell Kimchee and drink Soju.

Daily: Web of Files 2

A file in a typical file system resides within a hierarchy of directories, a tree with directories as branches and files as leaves.  Each directory has a name unique within its parent directory, so a file's location can be specified with a sequence of directory names.

To get a web of files, we can turn directory names into keywords and associate them with files.  Deferring issues related to the significance of the keyword order, we can imagine a file system UI that looks like this:

keywords: [Incoming, Win32, Blog]
========================================
  Name …
—————————————-
  blogx2.zip
> newscrawler13.zip
  Syndirella_20030216-src.zip
========================================
related: [commercial, Win32, Blog, …]
website: http://www.newzcrawler.com
…

Top section is used to view and edit a list of keywords defining the view.  Middle section list items related to all the keywords listed above.  Bottom section shows information about items selected in the middle section.  Keywords related to the selected item is also displayed.  Much of information about an item can be retrieved lazily from the web.  Note that listed files may be stored anywhere on the disk as long as they have ancestor directories named 'Incoming', 'Win32', and 'Blog' in any order.

At this point, its already useful.  However, it would be nice if the same UI can simulate traditional file system browsers, allowing the user to navigate using hierarchically.  More on this later.

I like Colin Powell

With him in it, I can withstand the stench of sincere idiocy in the Bush Administration.  Its too bad that his influence might be diminishing.  Chaney, Rice, and Rumsfeld are helping Bush make world history, the unpleasant kind.

A Backlash in Washington?.   I certainly don't know any of the facts, but I'd guess that the more hawkish members of the administration — who resisted Colin Powell's recommendation to use the UN to build consensus originally — are sitting there with "I told you so" looks on all of their faces. [Scott Loftesness]

Tim Oren’s Ruminations on VC business

Tim Oren, a newbie VC with programming background (since 1968!), provides some insider tips on how VC works.  He paints a bleak picture for entrepreneurs, but what he said rings true.  I guess I am sort of in the 'network', but I have yet to find an idea that I can spend other people's money and life on.  Its not that I don't have great ideas, too much in fact.  It is the willingness to take responsibility for other people's lives.  You know how some people just take their responsibilities too seriously?  Yup, thats me.  I gotta lighten up and become a believer.

Ruminations on venture capital, trust networks, and information theory  …  (C) is part of what keeps this from degenerating into an ol' boy club. According to my friend AnneLee Saxenian at Berkeley, over 25% of Valley startups now have CEOs of Indian or Chinese descent. (Lame local joke: "The Valley is built on ICs. Yeah, Indians and Chinese!") One of my partners is Indian, so he's tapped into the so-called TIE crowd. (TIE = The Indus Entrepreneur, both Indians and Paks). These guys are awesome networkers. Being Israeli or Korean or Brit also helps, but not quite so much.  …  [Due Diligence]

Its true that Korean entrepreneurial network in the Valley sucks when compared to Indian or Chinese networks.  Tim's blog is recommended.

Google Day

Today is Google day in blogspace.  I think they bought Pyra Labs to beef up their News service with personal opinions and server-side news aggregation.  But it doesn't really matter what the original intentions were.  I am sure Google will end up where they never expected to.  More interesting for me is who will follow next?  Yahoo, AOL, and MSN will feel the pressure to step up their blog-related plans.