Cloud Clarity vs. Shadow Banking

CAN THE BURGEONING INTEGRATED FABRICS OF WEB 3.0 HELP GENERATE A BROAD, SUPER-RESILIENT TRANSPARENCY THAT SAVES INT’L BANKING SYSTEMS?

The United States is facing what some experts are calling an “economic perfect storm“, with historical economists worrying about symptoms and reactions “not seen since the Great Depression”. Resources (natural and financial) are increasingly scarce, strained by tight credit markets and by competition from major emerging economies (China and India), and food prices are soaring.

One of the most serious aspects of the current crisis is tied to the widening deficit in the credibility of major financial institutions. The New York Times, for instance, is reporting:

The Federal Reserve not only [has taken] action unprecedented since the Great Depression — by lending money directly to major investment banks — but also has put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in questionable trades these same bankers made when the good times were rolling.

“Bear Stearns has made it obvious that things have gone too far,” says Mr. Gross, who plans to use some of his cash to bargain-shop. “The investment community has morphed into something beyond banks and something beyond regulation. We call it the shadow banking system.”

The lesson may be that we have a problem of endemic manipulations, permitted by current regulatory and technological standards. What if it were possible to build into international banking institutions —including but not limited to the manner and volume of transactions engaged in by investment banks— a transparency-insuring mechanism based on the dispersed computing power of an integrated web-based “cloud” matrix?

While a primary function of Web 3.0 must be the innovative enhancement of privacy safeguards, it should become increasingly possible to create broad-spectrum data-screening aggregator applications that allow for the creation of a banking process safeguard fabric. Multiple unique and even competing software analysis platforms could work on the same expansive datasets to help prevent dangerous overdependence on excessively volatile market trends.

Nano-chemical Computation Heralds New Era in Molecular IT

Scientists have achieved the goal of creating a nano-scale “chemical brain” that can transmit instructions to multiple (at present as many as 16) molecular “machines” simultaneously. The new molecular processor means that nano-chemical computation may soon be possible, ushering in a new era in super-light, super-fast, more versatile computer processing capabilities and, by extension, robotics.

The BBC reports that:

The machine is made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone. Each one is known as a “logic device”.

They each resemble a ring with four protruding spokes that can be independently rotated to represent four different states.

One duroquinone molecule sits at the centre of a ring formed by the remaining 16. All are connected by chemical bonds, known as hydrogen bonds.

The structure is just 2 nanometers in diameter, and can produce 4 billion different permutations of chemical transmission of “information”. This allows for a far more efficient distribution of information than a traditional binary circuit.

The researchers say the structure of the “chemical brain” was inspired by the activity of glial cells in the human brain. Glial cells are non-neuronal “glue” or connective cells. In the brain, they are estimated to outnumber neurons by 10 to 1 and assist in chemical transmission of neural signals. Their ability to transmit signals in parallel, or to multiple tangent cells at once, reportedly gave rise to the 17-molecule duroquinone design.

In recent years, the ability of research teams and engineers to keep pace with “Moore’s law” —which predicts that computing speed (by way of the reduction in size of processing units or the increasing density of circuits possible in a given space) will double roughly every 18 months— has been tested, due to heat-diffusion constraints and the related energy bleed.

Nano-chemical processors would enable an entirely new structure for the smallest-scale computing circuits, and could lead to serious advances in the nature and capabilities of microprocessors, which are far larger in size and could therefore contain many times more circuits than at present.

The researchers have reportedly already moved beyond the initial 17-molecule design, capable of processing 16 instructions simultaneously, to devices capable of 256 simultaneous transmissions. They are also designing a molecular device that would be capable of up to 1024 simultaneous transmissions.

• BBC: “Chemical brain controls nanobots”
• Wikipedia: “Glial cell”
• Intel: “Intel Opens First High-Volume 45nm Microprocessor Manufacturing Factory”

Cloudscape Computing: the Dispersed Matrix as ‘Infinite’ Computing Platform

As the web moves into a more mature stage of its adolescence, the beginnings of an all-media platform, computing has begun to move to the “cloud” format. Cloudscape computing means that software, files, private accounts and processing power are dispersed over an extensive array of machines across the world.

“The Cloud” is the world wide web, and the nature of cloudscape computing can provide significant, if surprising, returns in security and accessibility. Dispersing, via dedicated encryption, the bits that compose a given file over an array of servers, with some redundancy, can make it more difficult to hack into any actual file or file storage device.

And, where cloudscape storage and computing come into play, there is a genuine motivation for large organizations, or for the pressures of the vast consumer and advertising marketplace, to push for ever more accessibility (wirelessly, in mobile telephony) to online material, which could have a positive effect both in fomenting further innovation, broadening the array of services available and bringing prices down.

Cloudscape computing does have its shortcomings, or its risk areas, but all in all, it is one of the commercial practices most likely to push into new terrain in mobile and wireless web access. With that, however, comes the serious means of market control it may lend to web-based software giants like Google. As always, the freedom of content access, generation and distribution is a paramount concern.

The real change of dynamic in computing connection time and browsing tendencies, comes with the types of services that can be made available by way of dispersed or distributed document and database hosting. More dynamic websites, more graphic-intense visual content, higher processing speeds, software applications that require zero installation and zero hard-disk space, accessible-from-anywhere desktop publishing suites and content-management technologies, are just a few.

Cloudscape computing requires a level of impeccability in encryption and programming that goes beyond what has been required in consumer computing to date. But this demand is also a challenge that will help promote new exploration of the potential benefits of more complex, more flexible, more resilient encryption paradigms.

We will only begin to see real benefits of distributed computing capacity, for the average end-user, when instant document-transfer encryption stands have advanced far beyond what we now enjoy, layered and impromptu in ways that will require one or two orders of magnitude more processing speed (and bandwidth) than is now commonly available.

Electronic Paper Makes Reading a More Diverse & Flexible Experience

Researchers at MIT have been working for years now on a wide range of variations on the changeable visual text formats that might replace many of the backlit screens we now use to read and interact with electronic documents. ‘Electronic paper’ refers to a number of these technologies, able to reproduce encrypted files in visual text form, as if they were computer monitors, some touted as having “the look and feel” of real paper.

The benefits of this advance are various:

1. paper is an ancient technology whose ease of use is difficult to match, one of the pillars of civilization;
2. electronic paper may help eliminate the strain on forest environments that comes from increasing consumption of paper worldwide;
3. the texture of paper makes viewing a document less challenging to the eyes;
4. adding touch-response makes it possible to read “on-screen” with the feeling of flipping pages, visually and physically;
5. advances in storage capacity mean being able to store huge amounts of readable text and images in a very small space

The potential for streamlined storage and portability of large amounts of reading material is one of the most important functions of the e-paper phenomenon. The ability to not only store thousands of books, or hundreds of magazines with full-color imagery, or to view video or even browse the world wide web, from a paper-thin device, makes exploiting the resources of the information age a far more comfortable experience for the everyday commuter, or news reader.

At MIT’s Electronic Paper project, the fundamental challenge regarding e-paper is stated as follows:

Books with printed pages are unique in that they embody the simultaneous, high-resolution display of hundreds of pages of information. The representation of information on a large number of physical pages, which may be physically turned and written on, constitutes a highly preferred means of information interaction.

A key element in the quest for a less massive, but more flexible format for text reading, i.e. electronic paper, follows: “An obvious disadvantage of the printed page, however, is its immutability once typeset.” This is a major issue when relating to informaton that is not necessarily transcendent or in itself immutable, and commercial applications, as well as everyday news and information uses for paper, make it attractive to create an alternative that is precisely mutable, or rather, programmable, modifiable, able to be updated when the information itself has changed.

MIT’s Technology Review explains the hardware that makes e-paper work, in devices like Amazon.com’s ‘Kindle’ reader:

At the front of the screen is a layer of transparent electrodes. Below it are millions of microcapsules containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles, and below them is a layer of nearly a million more electrodes. A negative charge on one of these bottom electrodes pushes black particles to the top, and a positive charge does the same with the white ones. Each microcapsule acts as a pixel that can thus be made to appear black, white, or gray.

The gist is to achieve ease of use, visual stability, paper-like quality, and high-resolution text imaging, in a device that allows for interactive navigability and mass storage. Amazon.com has added a wireless download functionality that is designed to promote spontaneous purchase and on-the-spot access to e-paper-ready e-books sold through its store.

In October 2005, Sentido.tv reported that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, “told a London audience that the static format of paper would be replaced by paper-thin digital wireless devices which would be constantly downloading huge amounts of information from the internet. He predicted we would all be connected all the time, within 10 years.” Electronic paper provides some brave new frontiers for niche media to grow their markets exponentially, with new editorial methods and distribution mechanisms never before possible.

If e-paper and wireless internet meet in the coming process of hyper-convergence of media, we will find that text is at once ‘liberated’ and ‘filtered’, and we will need to implement mechanisms that ensure consumers have as much access, on a permanent and private basis, to information as with the standard purchase of a book, which sits comfortably in one’s home, in one’s private space.

This issue of privacy is vital to the entire question of electronic information, because of the fact that a press that is free to produce and distribute according to its own editorial choices tends to produce far more reliable information and helps protect the rights of individuals. A lack of privacy in the media sphere, by contrast, would have a chilling effect on what sorts of content some major media outlets would be willing to provide.

The standard for e-paper should also be maximum possible user-enabled modification (a standard that is the rule in paper publishing: readers can write, cross out, highlight, rewrite and reproduce section by section, by hand, and at will, what is meaningful to them, by their own standards, and without paying a licensing fee). The problem of technical specifications as minimum requirements for accessing information continues to be a nuisance in computing and web-browsing, but would be far more severe if there is a massive migration of text publishing from printed pages to e-paper.

Customization is essential to the long-term success of e-paper as a new, beneficial medium for authors, publishers, web-content providers, bloggers and readers alike. E-paper essentially constitutes an event horizon after which information may be fundamentally changed and questions of accessibility, credibility and longevity (conservation of format and re-accessibility), become central to the question of informational freedoms.

• MIT: “Electronic Paper project”
• E Ink Corporation: “Lower Power, Electronic Paper Displays” [commercial site]
• MIT Technology Review: “Amazon Kindle: The online giant hopes it’s created the ipod of digital books”
• eMedia Wire: “Self Published Book Achieves Top 1 Percent Sales Rank at Amazon.com’s Kindle Book Store”
  
• Washington Square News: “New shiny Amazon Kindle doesn’t replace my old book” [opinion]
• Sentido.tv: “GATES ANNOUNCES PLANS TO REPLACE PAPER WITH SILICON”