Not All Experts Have PhDs

Expertise comes in so many forms--I just saw a garbage collector empty a bin on a street corner; the type with a large hard plastic container that sits inside a more aesthetic permanent fixture. He took out the plastic can, walked to the truck and emptied it...then heaved it 20 feet through the air into its metal streetside housing. The pitch looked unlikely at best; it wobbled and spun in the air...and landed absolutely perfectly, nothing but net so to speak, saving him the time and effort of the expected course.

Corollary: the tyrrany of bureaucratically derived standards*: the way in which the lowest common denominator becomes the mean, or even above. The bell curve atrophies when manipulated. There is no doubt an ISO 9001 procedure which describes the proper and approved way to replace an empty trash can into its receptacle. Happily, this standard was ignored.

*I'm not blindly railing against standards in general; on the contrary, they are absolutely vital to everyday life and we couldn't do without them.

Social Bandwidth, Historical Progression of

Some disorganized thoughts on the bandwidth* involved in human communication. As history unfolds, we have continually expanded our social bandwidth (for interpersonal communication) over distance:

post/mail

telegraph

telephone (now portable)

internet (now semi-portable)

[future?]

But it is most likely the advent of synchronous communication (starting with the telephone), rather than sheer bandwidth, which was most responsible for quickening the pace of social change. Synchronicity also increases the time obligation and social burden of communication:

Stratification of depth of contact	Synchronicity	Time burden/Social obligation
post/SMS/email (one-way text)	asynchronous	minimal
voicemail (one-way voice)	asynchronous	minimal
IM (two-way text)	semi-synchronous	low
telephone (two-way voice)	synchronous	moderate
videophone/webcam (sound+sight)	synchronous	moderate/heavy
VR (future progression?)	synchronous	moderate/heavy
"real" F2F contact	synchronous	heavy

But one thing which seems apparent now is that the bandwidth required for meaningful social interaction is quite low. This actually pleases mobile phone carriers: they never expected SMS to be popular, but they are happy with their enormous profit margins (bit-for-bit, roughly 10,000x the margin on voice calls. Yes, ten thousand times). It also confuses them: if people don't need high bandwidth to communicate, and communication is the nearly exclusive use of mobile phones, why would they pay for high-bandwidth media services? Thus their conundrum. The bandwidth needs of communication haven't changed significantly since the 19th century, but the available bandwidth in increasing. What's to be done with it? Mobile carriers are going to have to figure out how to carry new traffic over their networks to prevent themselves from becoming a commodity service. But I digress.

Synchronicity, immediacy, and throughput: today we have to ability to select the best medium for our purposes. We can micro-customize our social interactions to a degree unthinkable 20 years ago. What's my purpose in saying this? I'm not sure. But it is interesting to consider the interrelationship of these three qualities, and the varied social demands they create.

One other point worth mentioning. In general, synchronous, immediate contact has the highest social obligation. But this is already changing. Face-to-face conversations today may be cut short by a mobile phone, and if the call is urgent, may put an abrupt end to the meeting. This rather novel phenomenon of being socially trumped by a non-present party is becoming increasingly socially acceptable.

Further thoughts later on the digitization of personal space and time.

*"Bandwidth" is defined loosely here as a multiple of speed and communicative throughput potential. I know that makes CS people cringe.

Google Tool Suggestion

I know I'm not the only one who's had this problem: you follow a link, or select an old bookmark for a site, and come up with a 404 error from the server. If you're "lucky", you'll be redirected to the site's main page, If you're really lucky, you may be redirected to the site's internal search engine. Common occurrence, right? Often happens after a major site redesign.

The problem is that you often don't know (or can't remember) enough about the page's content to form a useful query. Even if you can, many sites' search engines are terrible.

So--when (re)designing a site: archive the entire old site. Now, it would be possible to simply make the old pages available with a warning that they are outdated, but this might be undesirable for many reasons.

So--keep an archive of the past site's structure and content, and when a request for an outdated page comes along, run a comparison of that page (which is available only to the server) and find the best current match. Offer this to the user with an explanation. This makes the unavailable information useful, at zero cost to the user. Best of all, it doesn't require an explicit mapping of old URLs to new URLs. A "correct" match should be easily accomplished in most cases, although I don't have the algorithmic expertise to properly say. This also improves upon the Google cache solution by aligning the user with the new site paradigm, rather than just presenting the old information (which can be useful as well, for different needs).

Note to Google: my services are available for a reasonable fee.

Reality Break

"The subconscious did not exist anywhere until Freud wrote about it at the beginning of the twentieth century" --from The Art of Reading Dragons

True? False? An interesting starting point for long-winded discussion at any rate. On the same theme, from an entirely different angle, is the possibile time-irrelevant nature of quantum action. Choices today can(?) affect the past. Greg Egan takes this idea and runs with it on a macro scale in Distress.