3 Jul 2002 raph   » (Master)

Dirt and noise

Thanks to everyone who sent references to Shannon's 1948 paper.

Earlier, in discussing the software food chain, I asserted that lower-level nodes limit the performance and robustness of higher-level nodes that depend on them, but gave fault-tolerance as a counterexample. But, looking at communications channels, Shannon's theory tells us of a quantity, capacity, which subsumes both bandwidth and noise, and for which higher levels cannot exceed the capacity provided by lower levels. Looking at, say, reliablity alone, you don't see such a clear relationship. FEC is a way to get a high-reliability channel at a high level when only a noisy one is available at a low level.

The real world has lots of dirt and noise. Shannon was one of the first to really tackle that problem quantitatively, and the brilliance of his work still stands. Any new kind of science that pretends to model the real world must model dirt well, otherwise I am not convinced.

Trust

Ok, I am officially frustrated by the (lack of) response to my work on trust. I've gotten very nice encouragement from my friends on #p2p-hackers, and also mail from Mamading Ceesay, but even so, there still aren't very many (any?) people who are taking the time and effort to understand my work. I've done this work as a public gift, in the form of writing, free software, deployment, and placing the ideas in the public domain (everyone else is patenting their stuff like crazy 1 2 3 4 5 ).

Kevin Burton speculated that the reason I'm getting so little feedback is that all of the smart people are working for proprietary companies such as Google. Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm struggling with the basics of analyzing PageRank, while the 50 PhD's at Google have it all figured out and are laughing at my incompetence. Are any of you guys listening? I would appreciate a simple ping.

It is encouraging to see other people beginning to understand PageRank, even if they are "search engine optimizers." I just sent Markus email, and look forward to his response.

<AaronSw> the intersection of SEOs and linear algebraicists is small

Perhaps attack-resistant trustworthy metadata is just not an important goal. But then I see stories like this.

Jokes

If Bush is serious about his goal of having Palestine democratically choosing a replacement for Arafat, he's sending the wrong people. He shouldn't send Colin Powell. The one he should send is Katherine Harris.

The execs at Enron, WorldCom, etc., didn't sell their souls to the devil. We're talking more along the lines of leveraged equity swap deals.

neoblogism: (n) a made-up word whose only reason for existence is to signal a blog context.

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