Is there any reason to believe that clever cyberporn fraudster Marty Rimm won't be able to weasel out from under the Time/Carnegie Mellon porn-study scandal? Here's how he'll do it:1) During winter break, while the students are away at home, Carnegie Mellon University announces its finding that Rimm's ethical lapses can be attributed solely to inadequate supervision by his overworked faculty adviser, Marvin Sirbu, who won't be held responsible, either (since he generates serious grant money for the university).
2) The day after the announcement, Rimm holds a press conference. "What you have witnessed is a high-tech witch hunt of an uppity undergraduate!" he says. "But now, after the most meticulous investigation of my life and work ever conducted, am a vindicated man. And not one of my critics has managed to refute what the Carnegie Mellon study showed - that there is lots of pornography on the information superhighway."
3) Marty announces his book deal and starts working the talk-show circuit.
Mike Godwin (mnemonic@eff.org) is online counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
My grandfather believed in an invisible world. It was populated by angels, demons, and a beneficent God. For unknown reasons, his God had chosen to avoid being directly perceived by human beings. It had once been otherwise: He had shown himself many times 3,300 years ago. Nevertheless, it was still possible to perceive Him indirectly, most powerfully via tracks left in history.I am an engineer and a programmer. My world is different from my grandfather's, but, like him, I believe that the world we see is a manifestation of an invisible world we cannot see. My fellow technicians and I share a belief in an invisible world that is no less miraculous than my grandfather's and, many would say, no less evident of a beneficent God.
To hear about our invisible world, play the child's game of "Why?" Ask an elementary technical question, then ask Why? or What? or How? After a few levels of questioning, you're at the invisible domain; another level or two and you're in the spiritual domain. The depth of the stack is a measure of what is known. These layers often seem thin compared with the dimly perceived core.
I once played this game with an inquisitive girl of 13. I was demonstrating some graphics software during a "career day" event and had just closed a window on the screen.
"Where did the picture go?" she asked. "It's in memory," I answered. "What does that mean?" "It means that the picture is now stored in a different way and in a different place." "OK, where is it?"
I sensed that misty path that lives in the marrow of every technophile.
"Not where - what. It's not a picture anymore: it changed when I closed the window, transform-ed like a butterfly going back to a caterpillar. It's an arrangement of bits now. The computer broke it into pinhead-sized pieces. It recorded the position, brightness, and colour of each piece in a binary code." "Can I see the bits?" Drop down into the next world. "They're stored in CMOS structures.This means they're just below the surface of a few pinkie-nail-sized flakes of shiny silicon metal." "Show me." I opened the case and pointed to the memory chips. "Show me the little flecks of metal inside the black plastic." We used pliers and hammer to split a spare module so we could see the chip inside. "You said the bits are just below the surface. If we scrape the surface, can we see them?" Invisible world coming up. "Sorry. The transistor structures that hold the bits can be seen with a microscope, but not the bits themselves." The teacher came up with a photograph, taken through a microscope, of the top layer of an integrated circuit. At high magnification these circuits look like cityscapes seen from high in the air.
"Each room in the city holds one bit. A transistor acts as a door that can open to admit millions of electrons to each room." "Why millions?" "Because we can't detect one electron, only whole thunderclouds of them." "Can I see them?" "Sorry again. First, the room is never empty. New electrons simply add to an existing spongelike latticework of atoms and electrons. Second, electrons can't be seen. At the heart of the world of very small things is an apparent paradox: Any attempt to see them changes, randomly, what you're trying to see. It's like trying to grab smoke." "How do you know they're really there?" "By their effects. They're detectable in how they influence other things. They leave tracks, history." When all is said and done, I'm not so far from my grandfather. It's not difficult to leap from a visible world we sense, to an invisible one we can detect but never "see," to one just out of reach of our machinery, but real nevertheless.
It is important stuff we engineers, programmers, and scientists are about. The vast majority of the world is invisible. All of our doings, petty and otherwise, are built on a foundation that runs very deep. We do well to occasionally remember, with awe, the worlds that exist just out of sight.
Fil Yeskel (yeskel@vnet.ibm.com) is a senior engineer/scientist at IBM.
The digital and hypertextual forces supposedly leading to the death of reading are in fact going to lead to its golden age.Right now, we call it read-ing any time characters come before our eyes, whether we're "reading" a novel, a set of assembly instructions, a menu, or an exit sign. The term has come to cover too wide a territory. But reading is about to be niched.
The first books moving on-line are reference manuals. We want random and instant access to the information we need. And so, increasingly, online reference works are being designed as software applications rather than as online books.
Pretty soon we won't call using online reference works reading. Instead, we'll just call it referencing. This will leave the term reading to describe engag-ing printed matter where sequence does count, where the order of the presentation is an important part of its value - novels, essays, poems. Reading will become a time of continuity in a fragmented world.
David Weinberger (self@evident.com) is president of Evident Marketing in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Writers are worried about loss of authorial control on the World Wide Web. At first, it seemed that linking greatly expanded possibili-ties for author and reader alike. But when writers link to another site, they run two risks. The writer at the next site may convert your readers away from your point of view; worse, the readers may never return at all.And yet ... a Web document without links seems barren, a dead-end street, no place to go but back.
Why not make it so that if we send our readers out to a linked document, there is a way to beam them a message at the remote site? Something like: "Now that you've read about Abyssinian cats, click <HERE> to return."
If we can't get in that last plea, we've lost our chance to shape the tale.
Arthur Chandler (arthurc@crl.com) teaches at San Francisco State University.
3-D isn't an interface paradigm. 3-D isn't a world model. 3-D isn't the missing ingredient. 3-D isn't an inherently better representation for every purpose.3-D is an attribute, like the colour blue.
Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it's going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D.
F. Randall Farmer (randy@communities.com) is vice president of development for Electric Communities.
Some scientists believe that a petaflops (1 million billion floating-point operations per second) computer could correct bad image-processing in real time. I'd like to push that idea. Perhaps a petaflops computer could become a kind of universal camera. It might be able to re-create 360-degree landscapes, in any depth of focus and from any angle, through the light impinging on the surface of a black globe. No lenses, no film, none of that antiquated frippery - just raw photons and computational power.I imagine Public Telepresence Points, consisting of a rather mystical-looking black globe high on a mirrored stalk. The poetic obverse of a charlatan's crystal ball that people all over the world can peer into - or rather peer out from - this globe. Perhaps with a headmounted display, the computer simply calculates the viewer's needs in real time and composes the appropriate image, binocularly, for human vision. Subjectively speaking, you would have the experience of simply looking out over Trafalgar Square anywhere.
Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com) writes science fiction.