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Legend has it that when ENIAC, the first digital computer, was switched on for the first time, it drew so much power from the Philadelphia electrical grid it caused a brownout. Since then, computers— and supercomputers in particular— have always been significant consumers of electrical power. For the next generation of supercomputers, operating at petaflop speeds and working on things like detailed climate models, power consumption could represent a significant limiting factor. As Electronics Design Strategy reports,
In an irony of this environmentally conscious era, the supercomputers used to study issues such as climate change themselves impose a significant carbon footprint—consuming megawatts of electricity both directly and for the elaborate cooling systems that are required to deal with the excessive heat they generate. Even so, scientists wishing to tackle leading-edge research need 100× to 1000× more computing throughput than today's high-end systems can provide.
Scientists at UC-Berkeley and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center have proposed a new supercomputer design "using millions of low-power embedded microprocessors instead of conventional server processors," which is projected to use a fraction of the power of previous supercomputers. As Berkeley Research News explains:
To develop a 1-km cloud model, scientists would need a supercomputer that is 1,000 times more powerful than what is available today, the researchers say. But building a supercomputer powerful enough to tackle this problem is a huge challenge. Historically, supercomputer makers build larger and more powerful systems by increasing the number of conventional microprocessors — usually the same kinds of microprocessors used to build personal computers.... [A] system capable of modeling clouds at a 1-km scale would cost about $1 billion. The system also would require 200 megawatts of electricity to operate, enough energy to power a small city of 100,000 residents.
The proposed Berkeley-Tensilica computer, in contrast, would "consume less than 4 megawatts of power and achieve a peak performance of 200 petaflops." According to Electronics Design Strategy,
The joint effort will focus on massively parallel designs featuring large numbers of processor cores connected via optimized links.... Each core dissipates just a few hundred milliwatts while churning out billions of FLOPS, representing an order-of-magnitude improvement in FLOPS per watt over traditional desktop or server processor chips, according to Tensilica. A supercomputer harnessing millions of such cores, tightly integrated at the chip, board, and rack level, will achieve the exascale goal within a power budget of "a few megawatts."
Jon Ippolito on cyberspace, late 1998:
If Gibson's picturing of data as a navigable space were only a literary device, then accepting that device as a paradigm for actually building cyberspace would shackle us to old, spatial metaphors rather than enable new, post-geographic insights. But what may have begun as a literary device has quickly risen to the status of a cultural necessity in a decade when the rapid proliferation of telecommunications protocols become so complicated that no single user, much less reader, could understand them all. The sudden splintering of the job of Computer Programmer into various specialized vocations reflects how ill-prepared our culture was for this steep technological learning curve.
Clay Shirky on Wikipedia and leisure, 2008:
"Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.
Technorati Tags: collaboration, end of cyberspace, wiki
I'm going to Oxford this summer for the workshop on imagining business. I'll be talking about "paper spaces," the large, often room-sized roadmaps, timelines, and other documents the Institute uses in its workshops.
I've put a PDF of the paper online; I may experiment with putting a copy on Google Docs, and using Zotero to manage the citations (though that seems iffy, given that I often write pretty long footnotes). Whatever environment I use, the piece is like to undergo substantial revision over the next couple months, as I know there are a couple parts of the argument I want to expand. Here's the introduction:
This article is about paper spaces: room-sized maps, timelines, and charts used to develop, record and share ideas. When used in collaborative work, paper spaces support both focused, creative activity—the creation of a strategy roadmap, the outlines of a software development project, etc.—and informal social goals, like the development of a sense of community or common vision. These are essentially very large pieces of paper, but the term "paper spaces" (the term is borrowed from computer-aided design ) highlights several things. First, we're used to thinking of things made of paper as physical objects whose qualities help shape the experience of reading, but it's useful to pay attention to their spatial and architectural qualities as well. Large visuals aren't just things: they're spaces that possess some of the qualities of desks or offices. IFTF workshops exploit their scale and physicality to promote social activity between workshop participants. In this case, the spatiality of paper is fairly self-evident; but many of our interactions with paper, books, and writing have a spatial quality. Scholars could gain much by analyzing print media using conceptual tools from architecture, design, and human-computer interaction, as well as literary theory and book history.
Second, studying paper spaces help us understand the role that visualizations play in contemporary organizations. Historians have used studies of visual media and visual thinking to expand our understanding of science, technology, and other fields. The business world is supersaturated with visualizations—everything from advertisements, to PowerPoint presentations, to org charts, to brands, to workflows and flow charts—and studying those images could bring similar benefits. At the same time, it warns us against taking too passive or formal a view of visual tools in business, of treating them like paintings on a wall. In the way users interact with them-- they're annotated, extended, argued over, and played with-- they're more like Legos than landscapes. The process of creating maps, and the maps themselves, both reflect a set of attitudes about how to understand and prepare for the future, one that emphasizes user involvement, and the need for actors to develop and possess shared visions of the future. Finally, the term "paper spaces" highlights their hybrid, ephemeral quality. They work because they're simultaneously interactive media and workspace, but their lives are brief and easy to overlook: they are designed to support idea- and image-making, but leave little trace of themselves.
To illustrate how paper spaces work, this article will focus on their use in a specific context: in expert workshops and roadmapping exercises conducted at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley-based think-tank. The article begins with an overview of information spaces, and a brief look at IFTF's local culture and research practices. Next, it looks in detail at our expert workshops and facilitated exchanges, and describes how they're organized, what they aim to accomplish, and how they work. It then discusses how paper spaces support the co-creation of knowledge about the future, and a sense of group solidarity. Finally, it argues that paper spaces are ubiquitous: most of our interactions with texts and other media have a spatial dimension that affects the ways we read, think, and create.
The piece is currently a relatively svelte 5000 words long; I figure it'll hit 6000-7000 before I'm done. There are two big things I still have to do.
First, I have to build out the discussion of how working with (or in) paper spaces generates group solidarity, or a sense of common identity and purpose among participants.
Second, I hadn't planned on doing this, but my experience working with ZuiPrezi has made me think I should make explicit something I had planned to leave implicit: that the paper spaces I describe will become extinct in the forseeable future. When I was in Malaysia, I used ZuiPrezi in one of my workshops, and it was a terrific experience; and it leads me to believe that we're not far off from being able to replicate most, if not all, of the social functionalities of paper spaces in digital, projected tools. Thinking about what has made paper spaces work well has been essential for making them obsolete, and I think I'm going to add a section explicitly laying out what a digital system has to do in order to work as well as paper.
Technorati Tags: displays, end of cyberspace, facilitation, Kitchen Budapest, materiality, media, paper spaces, workspaces, ZuiPrezi
At a recent Institute for the Future conference, Mike Chorost remarked that devices like the BlackBerry are basically designed to give us ADD, and one of the challenges we face in the future is to design tools that aren't quite so disruptive or addictive. In that vein, ABA Journal reports that a New York law firm as banned BlackBerries and smart phones in meetings.
A law firm in suburban New York City has banned electronic devices from major meetings to prevent distractions caused by cell phones and BlackBerrys.
The six-month-old "no-device policy" at the Long Island law firm of Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone is intended to prevent even vibrations from incoming calls and e-mail messages from interrupting the flow of business....
At routine meetings, new guidelines allow participants to bring electronic devices but require them to step out into the hall when an essential call or e-mail demands an immediate response.
According to Newsday,
The "no-device policy" came about, says partner Ira R. Halperin, as the steady buzzes and vibrations signaling a new call or e-mail were increasingly interfering with meeting-goers' focus.
And you're not fooling anyone by trying to unobtrusively thumb out a response as you hold your BlackBerry under the table, says Halperin, co-head of the corporate law group, who admits to having been quite an offender himself.
At Slate, law blogger Philip Carter comments,
In my practice, and my work in/around government, I've seen this problem too. Big time. I'm certainly guilty of excessive BlackBerry usage. I even have colleagues (including some at Slate) who read their BlackBerries and thumb out messages while driving—a massive risk for them, and for their companies who may be held liable for anything that happens while they're reading/sending work e-mail.... I think we've gone too far—and that the quality of our counsel actually suffers because we are moving too fast and responding too quickly. We need to slow down.
Technorati Tags: attention, communication, mobility, psychology, ubicomp
Cyberspace is a "metaphor we live by," born two decades ago at the intersection of computers, networks, ideas, and experience. It has reflected our experiences with information technology, and also shaped the way we think about new technologies and the challenges they present. It had been a vivid and useful metaphor for decades; but in a rapidly-emerging world of mobile, always-on information devices (and eventually cybernetic implants, prosthetics, and swarm intelligence), the rules that define the relationship between information, places, and daily life are going to be rewritten. As the Internet becomes more pervasive-- as it moves off desktops and screen and becomes embedded in things, spaces, and minds-- cyberspace will disappear.
This blog is about what happens next. It's about the end of cyberspace, but more important, about what new possibilities will emerge as new technologies, interfaces, use practices, games, legal theory, regulation, and culture adjust-- and eventually dissolve-- the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is an historian of science and futurist.
Part of the Corante Innovation Hub.
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