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When the first single-celled organisms appeared on Earth, more than 3 billion years ago, they fed upon carbohydrates—sugars—dissolved in the sea. The sugars had their origin in chance chemical reactions. Life, however, multiplied exponentially; one cell made two, two made four, four made eight, and so on. Self…
Each individual's genome, in any one generation, will be a sample from the species database. Different species will have different databases because of their different ancestral worlds. The database in the gene pool of camels will encode information about deserts and how to survive in them. The DNA in mole gene pools…
The harder we look at the border between life and non-life, the more elusive does the distinction become. Life, the animate, was supposed to have some sort of vibrant, throbbing quality, some vital essence - made to sound yet more mysterious when dropped into French: elan vital. Life, it seemed, was made of a special…
One of the things I've been pushing is reading. I think that is the most useful thing that a community of programmers can do for each other—spend time on a regular basis reading each other's code. Then are's a tendency in project management just to let the programmers go off independently and then we have the big…
I guess to me the biggest change is that nowadays you can't possibly know everything that's going on in the computer. There are things that are absolutely out of your control because it's impossible to know everything about all the software. Back in the '7Os a computer had only 4,000 words of memory. It was possible…
Seibel: You mention four disciplines: music, graphics, mathematics, and text those are about as old as humanity. Clearly there are powerful ideas there that are independent of computers—the computer just provides a way to explore them that might be hard without the computer. Is there also a set of interesting…
The problem being the old saying in the business: "fast, cheap, good—pick any two." If you build things fast and I you have some way of building them inexpensively, it's very unlikely that they're going to be good. But this s|s school of thought says you shouldn't expect software to last. I think behind this perhaps…
And think about failure modes—I remember one of the great lessons I got about programming was when I showed up at the airport at Heathrow, and there was a power failure and none of the computers were working. But my plane was on time. Somehow they had gotten print-outs of all the flights. 1 don't know where—there must…
I do not think that truth becomes more primitive if we pursue it to simpler facts. For no fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field—a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that…
Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and…
I prefer sociobiologist E. O. Wilson's view of us as unfortunate tribal carnivores that have acquired intelligence. Our evolution is more like that of social insects; the advances in knowledge and understanding that we prize are more a property of the human nests we call civilization than of its individual members…
TODO: Make this link to the video embedded
TODO: Make this Link an Embedded Video
The Internet shows me more and more about those who participate in it, but I worry lest I forget that not everything or everyone in the world has a home on the Internet. Missing are those who cannot read or write, who have no access to a computer, or who chose to remain disconnected. There is a danger of coming to…
The NIIAC was a well-meaning attempt to collect a diversity of opinion to make sure the emerging "NII" was useful to all Americans, and it probably did more good than I suspected at the time ... The members included the usual suspects: a librarian; a grade school teacher; a communications workers' union official; the…
It is argued - though currently the arguments are filtering only slowly into the academic literature - that folksonomies are preferable to the use of controlled, centralised ontologies [e.g. 259]. Annotating Web pages using controlled vocabularies will improve the chances of one's page turning up on the 'right' Web…
Nevertheless, the next generation Web should not be based on the false assumption that text is predominant and keyword-based search will be adequate for all reasonable purposes [127]. Indeed, the issues relating to navigation through multimedia repositories such as video archives and through theWeb are not unrelated…
Global metrics look at extracting information about the graph as a whole. Compactness is a measure of how connected the graph is; a compact graph means that, in general, it is easy to reach a randomlychosen node from another. The usual measure has a range between 0 (totally disconnected nodes) and 1 (universal…
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query). One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA…
I myself have worked on projects like machine vision algorithms that can detect human facial expressions in order to animate avatars or recognize individuals. Some would say these too are examples of A.I., but I would say it is research on a specific software problem that shouldn