How could we even begin to wrap our heads around giving visual form to zillions of imperceptible ones and zeros that fly around the world every second?

Akamai Technologies claims that they handle 10 to 20% of the world’s Internet traffic. (Akamai is hired by other companies like Adobe, Apple and MySpace to host web graphics and streaming audio and video.) With access to data on about one-fifth of global network traffic, they’ve put together some interesting visualizations. These don’t pretend to be maps of the Internet, as others have done, but are still interesting ways to represent overall throughput, latency, and connection paths.

Project: Respond to readings about anticipation, particularly as it may be used for communication.

Theory: I was particularly interested in two definitions of anticipation by Mihai Nadin:

Anticipation is an expression of the connectedness of the world, in particular of quantum non-locality.

Anticipation is an attractor within dynamic systems.

With connectedness and attraction as my two main themes, I set about creating a system whose elements would not just react to, but act in concert with the user’s input. Specifically, the idea is to use the element of anticipation (instead of words) to communicate instruction about how to interact and trigger events within the system.

Medium: This is my first project done using Processing. I won’t say anything more about the interface — just try it out and leave a comment. Was it successful?

Launch project >

After a recent purchase at Rite Aid, I was shocked to find this inflammatory slogan on my printed receipt. The cashier may have thanked me, but the receipt was practically provoking me, throwing down the gauntlet, slapping its glove against my cheek. If “this time, it’s personal” indicates that someone’s gearing up to avenge a wrongdoing, then “with us, it’s personal” tells me that Rite Aid is always ready to fight back at any moment. In fact, I’m sensing here that Rite Aid has been pissed at me for quite some time, but only now that I’ve made an in-store purchase with my credit card can it look up my home address and use the element of surprise to its advantage — during dinnertime, say, or just as I’m getting home from school. (Note to self: In the future, always use cash.)

Seriously though, this is scary stuff. The branding committee must have thought this would sound comforting, but I read it as confrontational. Is it just me?

I was exploring Lawrence Lessig’s blog earlier and noticed that his commenting system uses reCAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA system run out of Carnegie Mellon.

What’s interesting about reCAPTCHA is that the words shown are unknown, even to the system. A regular CAPTCHA displays known words in distorted text, hopefully in such a way that only humans (and not spam robots) can read them. The human user types in the characters shown, and the system validates that the entry is correct.

reCAPTCHA uses words scanned from old books, and correlates the user’s input to a portion of the original work. Like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the Carnegie Mellon system deploys micro-tasks and takes advantage of distributed human labor to complete giant projects via minimal contributions of many. The idea, of course, is to perform OCR on books that are not practical to digitize using software (due to blurry letters, old typefaces, etc.).

“Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is.”

That’s Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, quoted in an article in yesterday’s New York Times on the concept of the paperless home. The dream of the paperless office, it seems, will never be realized, in part because paper is such an efficient medium for collaboration, but also because the company — not the employee — usually foots the bill. At home, where “users” are also the purchasers of paper and pricey printer ink, there’s more incentive to go paperless. Cost savings are great, but so are clutter-savings. That, coupled with inexpensive scanners, are leading more (but still very few) households to digitize receipts, tax returns, business cards and all other manner of daily ephemera that needs to be stored, but doesn’t need to be in your way. Digital cameras and MP3s have gotten us comfortable with maintaining valuable information in digital form. But it doesn’t just have to be photos and music anymore.

Now we bank online, pay bills online, write to each other, buy, sell, and trade — all online. These transactions all used to be recorded with physical, paper documents, but now they are recorded as digital data first, then only expressed physically on paper as needed. Utility bills now arrive via email, and even some physical interactions (such as in-person purchases at an Apple Store) trigger emailed, digital-only receipts.

What does this mean for us? Less paper sounds good, but locating physical documents is sometimes easier and more efficient than finding digital ones. So search technology still needs to improve. And paper documents don’t disappear when, say, coffee is spilled on your keyboard, or there’s a power surge, or you drop your laptop down the stairs. So backing up will be ever more important, but so will filing systems. We’ve had years to standardize methods of storing and organizing physical documents (visit any library), but how will digital documents be managed? Call me skeptical, but I don’t think it’s best to leave that up to the end users. We need thoughtful, well-designed software for managing all these different documents before the paperless home can be as efficient and enjoyable as it sounds.