You put your finger on the major issue: cost. The energy budget is a part of the noise factor of any communications network, artificial or organized. The web is predated by better designs with regards to noise and is a bit of a botch with respect to quality in terms of how it has been marketed. No surprise there because quite a bit of the technological infrastructure in use today is marketed that way with the marketing goals dominating the feedback to the design goals. The orthogonal pressure of investing schemes such as hedge funds, private equity, venture capital etc. drive the quality down further because the squeeze for numbers if not met by innovation come out of the employees and other aspects of corporate management.
Predictions that the network models such as the web would lead to this were made prior to the web tsunami not because of the web in particular although it is a particularly bad case, but because the laws of second order cybernetics and complexity indicate this will be the case. I use examples such as the questions on the blog simply to point out that even for what some would consider cultural memory with a very high penetration of exposure for some spatio-temporal event, the distortion effect of a high intensity noisy signal over a much shorter time at a higher bandwidth is sufficient to degrade the reliability of any copy. The cost of purchasing a vetted copy of the series, watching the first episode (sufficient to answer all of the questions correctly therefore to pass a single test of the reliability of the source) is quite minimal. The cost to correct the damage across the culture is not. So while the value of that particular corpus may not significant, it is easily demonstrated the modulation of frequency and amplitude for a signal of high impact is sufficient to distort a high value decision. Again, the first three pages of Shannon's seminal work provides the basic model of selectors (decision trees). To apply the model socially, behavioral science is a sufficient model. To figure these into a hypermedia system design that can adapt to distortion or to create distortion, a second order cybernetic model is a good start plus some study into signal filtering models. The web isn't actually designed to be dirty. It designed not to care if it is dirty or clean. It is a minimalist contract much the way a virus is a minimalist interface for propagation without regard to host degradation. The web doesn't care. You have to. That's the deal. len -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lars O. Grobe Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 2:39 AM To: VOS Discussion Subject: Re: [vos-d] Van Jacobson: "named data" > In effect, regardless of the wrapper, unless you have the original 1959 > first episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, you probably can't answer those > trivia question correctly. There are some approaches to organize these decentralized verification processes in the field of certificates. E.g. cacert.org, where you need a certain credit to sign and need a certain number of signers and documents verified. Maybe one could think about something like that for digital content. If I get the episode from 1959 as digital with the signature from a public library, I might trust it. If not, there might be a second one around, signed by another library, and if both are identical I might trust. Or one copy signed by two libraries. The question is if those libraries will spend the money on people verifying their digitized content, as this is not to be automated. And most of them suffer already from the efforts necessary to digitize content without "proof-reading"... Maybe the cheap, quick and dirty character of the web is part of its very nature, with proofed and verified content existing only on some small expensive islands... ;-) Lars. _______________________________________________ vos-d mailing list [email protected] http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d _______________________________________________ vos-d mailing list [email protected] http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
