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Theory is when you know everything, but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works, but no one knows why.
In this room theory and practice come together …
Nothing works and no one knows why.

The New York Times reports on a web site where you can rate prostitutes on a 0 to 10 scale, like ratemyprofessors.com for rating college professors. The man who started the prostitute-rating site said he did so because “There was no way to hold people accountable for their actions.” Some prostitutes¬†are reportedly worried about what will happen to their business if the site closes down. The rankings have gotten so important that one “escort service” threatened antitrust action when it was excluded, claiming that being listed was “essential to effectively compete in the upscale escort services market.”

Who knew? A lot of people, apparently; the site gets up to a million hits a month.

The official book launch is this Wednesday, June 18, at the Harvard Coop in Harvard Square, at 7pm. Ken and I will be there, and we’ll have the whole ground floor. It will be informal and friendly. Come and join the conversation. (Hal, alas, will be on the west coast.)

NB: Amazon says the book will not be available until July 15, but that is false. They will start to turn up in bookstores this week, and Amazon should be shipping very soon.

Two dozen leading Internet researchers met last week at a workshop hosted by Google in Mountain View to discuss the growing crisis in network measurement.

The crisis is this: despite the critical importance of the Internet infrastructure, no one really knows how well the Net is working and how well it will hold up under increasing use. The measurement data that would help network researchers analyze network performance isn’t being collected ‚Äî perhaps it can’t be.

As a consumer, you can tell when your cable TV channels are on the fritz, or when your cell phone reception is poor. But when your Web response is sluggish or you can’t connect to a favorite site, you’re pretty much in the dark. It might be that the site you’re trying to connect to is down or overloaded, but it might also be a loose connection in your house, or a problem with your computer’s settings, or a program bug.

It might also be that your Internet service provider is intentionally slowing down your connection for various applications, a practice known as traffic shaping or, more pejoratively, as data discrimination. University network services and some other ISPs often do this to slow down response on peer-to-peer sharing for music or video files. Or an ISP might actively disrupt the flow of packets by injecting spurious reset commands into TCP streams, one of the techniques used in the “Great Firewall of China” to block connections to politically undesirable sites. And not only China. In 2007 rumors circulated around the Net that Comcast was actively interfering with peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic. Comcast denied it, but measurements performed last October by the Associated Press revealed that Comcast was in fact disrupting those connections.

For the average person, there’s almost no information available on which to base informed decisions about the service provided by an ISP. The factors affecting performance and too complex, and the data is simply unavailable.

And the situation isn’t much better for top network experts. Even for the Internet’s core, there are no good public sources of performance data; indeed, measurement data is often kept secret, since it’s considered to be valuable proprietary information by service providers. Researchers simply don’t know, for example, which segments of the Internet are particularly vulnerable to congestion, or what fraction of Internet traffic is due to viruses and spam.

The experts in Mountain View last week, many of whom conduct their own measurement experiments, discussed ways of sharing data and methods for getting better results. They also considered creating tools that non-experts could use to get information on the performance of Internet connections. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides links to some tools at
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp, but these are limited and hard to use, and the results are difficult to interpret.

There were ideas for improving testing, but privacy is a real quandary: effective testing requires combining measurements from multiple sources. A public database of detailed network performance measurements would be a boon to research, but the same database could be mined for details about who was using the Internet when, and for what. The dilemma is like the privacy tradeoffs for epidemiological studies, between the needs of public-health experts and the desire to preserve privacy of individual medical records.

For such critical infrastructure as the Internet, the ignorance of consumers and experts alike is troubling and potentially dangerous. In the words of K Claffy of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA):

While the core of the Internet continues its relentless evolution, scientific measurement and modeling of its systemic characteristics has largely stalled. What little measurement is occurring reveals some disturbing realities about the ability of the Internet’s architecture to serve society’s needs and expectations.

In the Crimson piece I mentioned in this morning’s post, I said that Rowling might prove to be an inspirational speaker. SHE WAS! The speech is well worth listening to. text and video here, cut to 1:03 unless you want to hear the reports on how much money Harvard raised. One of the best commencement addresses I’ve heard, wise, and personal without being maudlin.

No, not hemophilia, and this term has nothing to do with homophiles either. Homophily is your tendency to hang with people like you. There is good reason to think that the communications revolution encourages it. When we we spent our time talking with the people fate had put in our neighborhoods and workplaces, we got used to dealing with ideas and attitudes different from our own. With the infinite connectivity of the Internet, even the oddest splinter groups can draw huge numbers from a world-wide pool, and we can happily spend all our time talking to our alter egos. (The opposite of homophily is xenophilia. I took a lot of heat in 1995 for trying to encourage a bit more xenophilia by changing the method by which Harvard students are assigned to the residential Houses. Ethan Zuckerman has a good blog about these terms here.)

CBS News is reporting that extremist Muslim women are banding together anonymously to protest being excluded from Al Qaeda. Some complain of being powerless, and others point with pride to the rising number of suicide bombings being carried out by women. As the story explains, Al Qaeda uses the Internet, but “the Internet has also given those disenfranchised by al Qaeda – in this case, women – a voice they never had before.”

So asks the New York Time’s blog today.

I know the answer about these two Harvard dropouts, because I taught and graded them both. I also had some outside-the-classroom interactions with each of them while they were students. I gave Gates the “pancake problem,” which is the source of his sole publication in a scholarly journal. (Careful; that’s a 5MB file if you download it.) A few months before founding Facebook, Zuckerberg put up a prototype social network in which the edges denoted “being mentioned in the same Crimson story,” and I was at the center.

The answer to the question? Hate to disappoint, but due to professional ethics and¬†FERPA requirements, I’m not telling! I will only say that I have no evidence that anything they say in this interview about their episodic study habits is inaccurate.

As we wrote Blown to Bits, we came to recognize that many of the stories in the news were “bits stories.” Sometimes it’s a bit of stretch, other times far less so. Consider world hunger.

The price of rice has been rising. A story last month in the New York Times reported that rice producing coountries were cutting back on exports, civil unrest was rising, and a crisis loomed. For populations that spend a large portion of their income on food, populations where rice is often a staple of their diet, these increases can be devastating. It is a complex problem with potentially dire consequences.

But how is it a bits story?

The University of Washington’s “Nutritious Rice for the World” project is seeking to mitigate world hunger by analyzing rice proteins. The goal is to make it possible for farmers to grow rice strains with higher yields, greater resistance to disease, and even improved nutrition. It’s a noble cause, and a difficult scientific and technical problem. The computational needs of the project are enormous. Using conventional computing approaches the time to complete the analysis could well be measured in centuries.

We could just wait for computing power to increase. With computers doubling their performance approximately every year (close enough for this calculation), in a a decade, they will be 1000X faster. A task that would take 200 years using todays’ computers should take 73 days then. Wait another decade, and they will be 1,000,000 times faster and our protein analysis will take less than 2 hours. But the rice crisis won’t wait that long.

The team at the University of Washington had a better solution – harness the aggregate computing capacity of thousands and thousands of otherwise idle computers – your computer and mine (if you choose to participate). They joined the World Computing Grid project.

A computing grid is a loose collection of computers that work cooperatively, each doing a small portion of a large computing task. It’s similar to the way Google works – dividing the processing of your query across lots and lots of computers so that the response is fast. This particular grid joins technology and social involvement, allowing individuals to “contribute” unused computer time. In addition to analyzing rice proteins, WCG now has active programs for cancer research, AIDS, protein folding, denque fever, and more. The WCG harnesses the computing power of over 1,000,000 computers from more than 380,000 participants.

This is one more example of the transformative power of the digital revolution. Not only is it possible to do complex protein structure analysis, but also we can share the task across thousands, even millions of computer linked through the Internet, computers that belong to ordinary citizens of the world, with a shared purpose, part of a community that has been made possible only by virtue of the social connectivity that the Web engenders and supports.

Even world hunger is a bits story.