NBIC: Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno

There's no one silver bullet technology that's going to make us all into superbeings. The trick is in the mix of different technologies. NBIC stands for nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. Look at it this way: with nanotechnology and biotechnology, we stand to gain control over inorganic and organic matter. With advanced information technology, we get not just the horrendous data glut that's now tormenting us (and our National Security Agency), but d...

 Compactness in Linked Hypertext

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 connections). Compactness of 0 is obviously hopeless for an information space, but perhaps less obviously the graph shouldn't be too compact either; if authors of webpages are sparing a...