Computing Cloud

Cloud Computing

Internet Cloud

The Cloud is the name that is given to the amorphous entity of binary digits, not rain drops, that hovers in the global atmosphere, that our economies and social interactions are increasingly dependent on, and that touches down from time to time to earth at industrial sized server farms that are starting to pose a threat to the global climate.

This week the Economist has both a full article and a leader on the subject of the energy guzzling Computing Cloud: Down on the Server Farm These global entities are run by large internet companies in huge warehouses, some as big as several football pitches. “These data centres are filled with thousands of powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via fast fibre-optic links.” The article refers to the place “where the cloud touches down”. The servers on these farms are so numerous and powerful that as much power may be required for cooling the computers as for the actual data crunching. It concludes: ‘In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.’ For the Economist Leader on the topic see: Buy our stuff, save the planet

Wikipedia tells us that the term “cloud computing” “derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet or IP availability, using an illustration of a cloud”. “The architecture behind cloud computing is a massive network of “cloud servers” interconnected as if in a grid running in parallel, sometimes using the technique of virtualization to maximize the utilization of the computing power available per server.” It states that it is not the same as the business model of “Software as a Service”.

Alex Barnett in his blog gives some rather more people friendly explanations, as for instance the tentative, “maybe it’s more like one giant thought-bubble in the sky?”, along with pretty pictures and some interesting links.

One of these links leads to an article called The Internet Cloud by Jessie Holliday Scanlon and Brad Wieners from Wired magazine. They use wonderful phrases like “the great cloud of unknowing has many disciples” and they discuss the reasons for the cloud being the main icon for representing the net, seemingly because it hides a lack of understanding about, or ability to explain, the inner workings, and it has no clear boundaries: ‘We always drew networks as amoeba-like things because they had no fixed topology and typically covered varying geographic areas,” says Vint Cerf, cocreator of TCP/IP, the language of networked computers. In short, no one needs to know the exact route their data will take to get from point to point. Everything is fine as long as it comes out of the cloud at the correct address.’

Creative Conclusion:
The Cloud is a giant thought bubble in the sky, with more thoughts even than Dilbert.
The Cloud is a vast grid of server farms that are themselves vast collections of data centres.
The Cloud is Software as a Service on the net as well as Software that is not a Service on the net.
The Cloud is trillions of millions of billions of bits zooming around like an infinite swarm of bees in the great bit dump in the sky.
The Cloud is like a traditional cloud - it has an impact on the environment. It may serve us well, with gentle rain, or it may cause a deluge that may drown us all.
The Cloud is the internet energy guzzler that far from being a green technology may cause climate change by the vast amounts of power it consumes.

My mind Clouds over and I ask these Questions:
Does Humanity have its head in the Clouds?
Is this the new the Cloud on the Horizon?

ETYM

Traditional Cloud (water vapor)
Mushroom Cloud (nuclear explosions)
Electron Cloud (the atom)
Information Cloud, Info Cloud (mobile communications)
Tag Cloud (social software)

As the the Rolling Stones sang way back in the sixties:
“Hey! You! Get off of my cloud.”

Apologies for absence - I’ve been off on my own cloud!

The Code of Life has now spawned the BarCode of Life.

DNA Barcoding is a way of identifying an organism as belonging to a particular species, based on its mitochondrial DNA. Often a small section of a gene called the COI is used. Wikipedia describes its use in the identification of birds and flowering plants and the controversy that it has created amongst scientists. Some scientists “resent what they see as a gross oversimplification of the science of taxonomy”.

This week the Economist has an article entitled Taxonomy in which they tell us that “Biologists want to barcode half a million species in the next five years”. We are told that “DNA barcoding was invented by Paul Herbert” who wanted “to generate a unique identification tag for each species based on a short stretch of DNA”. The Economist uses both the noun forms (”DNA barcoding“, “DNA barcode“), and the verb forms (”to barcode“, “have barcoded“), as well as new compounds based on the DNA part being understood or assumed (”bird barcoding“, “barcode factories“).

The prestigious scientific journal “Nature”, that originally published the seminal article by Watson and Crick in 1953, tells us, intriguingly, that “DNA barcoding is no substitute for taxonomy”. (Try typing that into Google.) I say intriguingly as I cannot read any more of this article as it is hidden behind a gateway to knowledge that only “special people” have access to. (Nature has provided an open link for us all to read a contribution to the “Open Access Debate”.) Perhaps some readers of this blog will be electronicially enabled to read about the subtleties in the DNA Barcoding / Taxonomy debate and possibly even fill us in a bit about the implications of Cyber-taxonomy or Digital-taxonomy.

I associate BarCodes with Supermarkets. I wonder how long it will be until we can buy a Species Specimen and check it out at the DNA Barcoding machine. Already Barcoding is being used in the identification of flowering plants. How long until the local garden centre does a “DNA Swipe” on your geraniums?

ETYM

DNA - Deoxyribonucleic Acid

From “Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” or “D.N.A.” as Watson and Crick described it in their article in Nature on April 25th 1953.

Deoxyribose refers to the fact that oxygen has been removed from the ribose sugar part of the molecule.

Wikipedia will enlighten any readers who would like to get to know others of the family of DNA related words - DNA supercoiling, DNA polymerase, DNA replication, DNA ligase, to name just a few of the compounds that this three letter acronym has spawned.

DNA is commonly known as the Double Helix of Life.

Barcode

Wikipedia tells us that it is a “machine-readable representation of information”.

As it is often represented by dark lines on a light background the code is turned into visible bars, hence BarCode.

This ancient and quietly important word seems to have achieved a new blaze of publicity due to the noisy financial earthquake that has recently circled the globe, partly in the electronic wires and wireless spaces that are the digital highways, partly in the minds of the people who decide whether to trust the numbers on their computer screens, all in the no-man’s land that could be called the global trading space.

A highly educated friend of mine recently revealed to me that she did not know the meaning of the word Algorithm. I was rather shocked because normally this friend would know the meaning of a word and I might not. This made me wonder how I know the word but I felt that I had always known it. Maybe it goes back to the days of school maths.

Wikipedia gives a full description of the term including its history and its various classifications. Having read the Wikipedia entry I now believe that I never did understand the meaning of the word after all. I had the simple idea that it referred to a number of steps that in some way or other represented a formula along a timeline. Not being a mathematician it was a term that I only ever had to understand in a vague sense.

That vague sort of understanding of Algorithm will I think become more common. The term has gone mainstream. It is no longer confined to hallowed mathematical spaces. It has escaped into the real world in a very big computer assisted fashion, and this week as the financial crisis that we are told originated in America has hit the British high street the spotlight is on the rogue algorithms that may have played some role in this vast computer game that seems to me to be what they call money.

This week Algorithms feature strongly in the Economist, which has an article simply entitled Algorithms, with the subtitle “Business by numbers”. We are given a nice easy description from the head of Microsoft Research in Cambridge - “A computer program is a written encoding of an algorithm“. In fact computers feature widely in this article. We are told, for instance, that algorithms that control different aspects of the internet do not always communicate with each other. In another article in the same issue we are told that ants could help us to design better Algorithms. In yet another article we read about “computer generated ‘algorithmic trading‘ programs”, which in some big exchanges are responsible for about a third of the trading.

In “Algorithmic Trading: the use of algorithims in automated trading” John Bates writes “In the algorithmic trading space, an “algorithm” describes a sequence of steps by which patterns in real-time market data can be recognized and responded to in order to detect trading opportunities and place and manage orders in the market.”

Algorithmic Trading, Wikipedia tells us, is also known as “algo, automated, black-box, or robo trading“. These terms are interesting give-aways. A “black-box” normally refers to something that we don’t understand the workings of. “Robo” I assume refers to “robotic“, although I like to think that it might have a hint of “robber” in it. After all, where did all the missing money go?

ETYM

It originated from the term Algorism, which was derived from the name of a medieval Persian mathematician, al-Khwārizmī, “the father of Algebra“.

See the Online Etymology Dictionary

The Geospacial Web.

The prefix Geo comes from the Greek and means Earth. It has spawned an incredible variety of Earthlings, including Geometry, Geography and Geology. I like the sound of Geognosy, which means a knowledge of the structure of the earth, but the one that I like the best is Geomancy, the art of divination by means of lines and figures.

This week the Economist brings us a story “The world on your desktop” about the Geoweb and the associated Geobrowsers, Neogeographers and possible future menaces of Geohacking and Geospam. Virtual maps are combined with other sources of data to create Mash-ups (See previous blog item) and the road to Web 3.0 is paved with new tagging protocols to ensure interoperability of Geodata.

Wikipedia as usual is quick off the mark with an item on the Geoweb that offers some history on the origins of the concept of a Geospacial Web, as well as some information about underlying technologies, for instance Virtual Globes, GIS and AJAX.

There is a GeoWeb 2007 Conference which is subtitled “From Mashups to Infrastructure”, which gives a feel for the scope of the term and the grandiloquent predictions of its future significance.

According to the Economist we can at present via Google Earth see images of Chinese nuclear submarines. But not only the big and dangerous feature on this new Big Brother Web. Beware, because Google’s special cameras may catch you at just that time and place where you do not want to be Positioned for Eternity. In the future it is predicted that the technology may become even more intimate - the use of satellite-positioning technology in your mobile phone could even lead to a form of extrasensory information awareness.

This last sentence made me feel very tired. Tired of travelling, tired of technology, tired of new protocols. The latest markup language, KML, Keyhole Markup Language, (offspring of XML naturally) I feel to be aptly named. Although it originated from the name of some reconnaissance satellites it appears that the new Keyhole may involve not just viewing the infrastructure of the earth but also some voyeurism of a rather intimate kind on each and every one of us.

Since last writing this blog I have travelled to Cambridge to teach, I have travelled back to my home by the sea in the east of Scotland, I have travelled to Glencoe in the west of Scotland, and I have walked on the Silver Sands near Arisaig. In Glencoe I slept in the pouring rain in a tent and awoke to see some amazing mountains disappearing into the clouds above me. As I now look up more about these mountains I realize that I am indulging in the vice of Geognosy but I feel compelled to share it with you. Lochaber, which includes Glencoe, has an outstanding Geology and Geomorphology and has recently become a European Geopark. Oh, drat, I forgot to ask for the Glencoe Geotrail leaflet. I suppose I was too busy pretending that I was young again, enjoying camping in the rain and being a long way away from any internet connection with the only Web that I had to worry about being one that might be spun out of gossamer around my head if some water weary spider should enter my tent. Or perhaps the mountain fairies might weave a GeoSpell to entrap all hapless campers who did not respect the fact that the mountains of Glencoe consist of some of the oldest volcanic strata in the world and were repositioned around 380 million years ago. Well, at least some things in the GeoWeb remain more or less still. How did Eliot put it? “At the still point of the turning world.” Be surrounded by mountains, I say, if you are to be Positioned for Eternity.

ETYM

Geo

Web - see Webcaster

We are in high-season TEFL in the UK at present, which means that many of us feel as if we are performing a high-wire juggling act, with one moment a bunch of teenagers (Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, whatever) facing us and the next moment senior business clients, again from any part of the globe, sometimes in intensive one-to-one classes for almost eight hours a week.

This week I have been in the Multinational Teenage Zone and just as I was reeling from trying to learn yet another bunch of facial expressions plus associated names (my particular weak point) that will mostly disappear from my life totally within the next fourteen days I received notification of a package to be picked up from the local DHL office. When I finally retrieved my package it turned out to be a number of books concerned with teaching Business English that I had been sent for free due to the fact that I had attended the IATEFL Conference this year. (One of the big advantages of attending that conference, apart from the stimulation and the fun of the event, is the number of very good free books that, if you are in the right spot at the right time, you can acquire.)

One of the good books that I discovered in my package from Pearson/Longman this week was “How to Teach Business English” by Evan Frendo. They dedicate a short section to Web quests, which is basically a way of getting learners to search for relevant information on the internet and then use it in a sensible way. In this book it is seen as one method of teaching Business English at a distance.

The British Council is also involved in defining the term, though their contributers, Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly, use the one word term - Webquests.

I did a search on both “Web quest” and Webquest” and discovered that the latter is much more common on the internet, in fact it had more than three million hits on google.

Another site called teAchnology offers its own definition of a Web Quest - “a method used to engage students in inquiry based learning” and it offers Web Quest Generators for Cyber-Starters. My impression is that this particular Quest, though perhaps not as big as that for the Holy Grail, is pretty big out there in Cyberspace, but my real reason for Citing this Site (perhaps the start of a ditty there) is the wonderful connotation of an “Online Teacher Resource” that dares call itself teach-nology, or teAchnology, with a big bright green capital A just in case anyone forget the Aches and Pains, as well as the rewArds of course, that go along with teaching, particularly the teenage variety.

ETYM

Web - already covered on this blog, in particular under Webcaster.

Quest - a long and often difficult search.

In medieval times Malory wrote about the quest of the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table to find the Holy Grail, which was renowned for its mystical qualities.

Quest - the term is popular in computer games. There are many games with Quest in the title including one called “Titan Quest”, but I expect my teenaged students could inform you better than me!

No, this creature is not some form of Spiderman but is a creature that produces internet broadcasts, a form of streaming media called Webcasts, including those from our own UK parliament. The parliamentary site is produced by Westminster Digital that gives its own definition of Webcasting, which includes describing it as “a way of delivering recorded and live audio and video content over a network”.

Last month the Economist had an article entitled Internet radio: Tuning out on Webcasting and Webcasters.

Actually this form of communication has been around for a while and the words Webcast and Webcasting have already made it into some of the dictionaries. Yourdictionary even has a Wordcast etymology [web + (broad)cast.] and allows you to hear the word spoken, albeit with an American accent. The MacMillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners which is a wonderful dictionary, and very computer-aware, defines Webcasting as “the use of the Internet as a way of broadcasting information using websites”.

ETYM

Web - a net, as in a spider’s web.
Web - a complicated thing, as in “a web of lies”.
The Web - all things in the www, the World Wide Web of interlinked hypertext documents accessible via the internet.

To Cast - to throw something, as in “to cast a net”.

Broadcast - a form of sowing, firstly seed, but later sound, as in radio, and finally images and sound, as in television.

Narrowcast - like broadcast but only to be received by a few people.

Spiderman - the great web-slinger, having been bitten by a genetically-altered spider, casts his net.

Retiary - relating to the making of webs or nets, or fighting with a net .

Once, many years ago, I wrote a very academic article which focused in at one point within an intricate argument (the twists and turns of which I no longer remember) on a very evocative word, Retiarie, as used by the fascinating seventeenth century author, Sir Thomas Browne. He wrote about “the mathematics of the neatest Retiary Spider” and “the woof of the neat Retiarie spider, which seems to weave without transversion, and by the union of right lines to make out a continued surface, which is beyond the common art of Textury, and may still nettle Minerva the Goddesse of that mystery”. In that article, webs and nets, “la red” (Spanish for net) and the Retiarie of Browne and of his follower (or double) Jorge Luis Borges, take on metaphysical proportions. I think that both of these authors might find it intriguing that that article is available on the web, and you can have a sneak preview by slotting “retiary spider mathematics” into Google. I say sneak because the gatekeeper JSTOR, which describes itself as an “online journal archive”, allows non-authorized internet users (myself included) to see only the first page of the article, unfortunately not the one in which the metaphysical spiders are discussed!

How I hope that the Webcasters of the future will spin their webs freely, and sow them like the lilies of the field. For this new form of communication is “beyond the common art of Textury“. This streaming media of audio and video content broadcast over the internet is a new method of conveying knowledge, and as such I hope that we are all authorized to turn on, tune in and then, if we so wish, to drop out. After all, we might want to cast our own nets just a little bit wider than that of the internet’s new Spiderman!

Electronic Discovery. This is a new legal concept that has arrived from America and that some people say will create headaches even more severe than those caused by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for Public Company Accounting, that even I with minimal interest in accounting have heard people complaining about.

According to the Economist article Electronic discovery: of bytes and briefs, E-discovery is both more intrusive and more burdensome than the traditional discovery process, and the courts are struggling.

In the E-discovery process it is not just that not very discreet email that you thought you had deleted but that still leaves a digital trace somewhere on your hard disc that may be under investigation, but also possibly your firm’s entire document management system.

Glasgow University runs a postgraduate course on Computer Forensics and E-discovery, and this course will teach, amongst other things, cyberinvestigation skills.

The Wikipedia article on E-discovery examines the differences in nature (and the implications of these differences) of electronic information and paper-based information, including the frequent use of meta-data (data about data) in the former.

I foresee chaos in the future. By its very nature all digital data is alterable. Meaning itself depends on mutually understood protocols, categories and rules, but that mutual undertanding takes time to establish, and meanwhile time’s winged juggernaut flies rapidly on creating new technologies, new databases, new document management systems, new image file formats, new metatags, new meanings. Hey ho! Plenty jobs for the boys - and the girls too. Tell your kids to take up law!

ETYM

E - A prefix meaning Electronic. This has become a very frequently used prefix, sometimes with a hyphen and sometimes without, as in email, ecommerce, ebusiness, ebanking, ebook.

Discovery - A legal term in which both parties involved in a dispute disclose documents and other evidence.

It must be very nice for Andrew Keen to get such wonderful (I assume free) publicity for his anti-blogging diatribe, courtesy of the British tax payer. Not just free publicity but top class (prime time) free publicity, which is what the interview this morning with Jim Naughtie on “Today” (Radio 4’s flagship programme) is.

This is not the first time the BBC has decided to publicise this arrogantly entitled book - “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assulting Our Economy”. I downloaded a chunk of it from the BBC Newsnight blog last month and suffice to say that some (not all) of the supposedly amateur comments were to my (assumedly amateur) mind more interesting than Andrew Keen’s pompous text.

Obviously Mr Keen, who is so worried by the ability of “the Web 2.0 revolution” (as he calls it) to decimate “the ranks of our cultural gatekeepers” does not have to worry too much himself, as with the BBC (one of our great cultural gatekeepers) on his side how can he lose? I’m sure the publicity they are giving him (funded by the masses of course) will at least get him a few readers (unfortunately myself included) and allow him to sell a few books!

Having said all this, I do agree that it makes for a lively, if rather overdue, debate. However, it reminds me a little about the effects of the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the way in which it allowed the masses to read the Bible. This article on “The Birth of Printing” from the Springfield Library tells us that “the effects of Gutenberg’s press were quickly felt across Europe” and that within 50 years 35,000 editions had been issued.

Sorry, Mr. Keen, but the genie of the internet is out of the bottle. Its effects may not all be positive, but it is certainly here to stay! As the Pulitzer prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman puts it in the title of his book about “the globalized world in the twenty-first century” - “The World is Flat”. Not completely flat, I would say, but yes, interestingly flatter. We certainly live in very interesting times!

(You can read more about this controversy at the blog “Crowdsourcing: tracking the rise of the amateur”, where Jeff Howe, who was at first happy that someone was “finally poking a stick in the Web 2.0 happy hive” later wondered why the antagonist had “to wield such a clumsy, ineffective tool”.)

ETYM

I refer you to my recent item on Web 2.0 - again as sign that I am in tune with the Zeitgeist, or at least that defined by some of our major cultural gatekeepers!

I think I must be in tune with the Zeitgeist as yesterday I covered bot herders in my botnet post and tomorrow’s Economist (well, the print version says June 23rd) covers bot-herders (they use a hyphen) in their article entitled Cyber-crime: a good bot roast . The Bot Roast refers to the name of an FBI operation against the creators of botnets, which far from being merely a geeky sort of prank are now seen as a danger to national security.

To continue my Cybertheme (my new word unless anyone else got there first) this post is entitled Cyber-hygiene, which the Economist says is “a public good”. The bot-herders that were targeted by the FBI were American as were most of the victims. But, the Economist tells us, the American administration’s Cyber-sheriffs “want an international posse” ASAP.

You might think that Cyber-hygiene would be a new word, so beautifully fitting a theme of the month. However, typing it into Google brings up over five hundred replies. I wonder how many it will bring up this time next year. I would hazard a guess at five hundred thousand. It is even in the answers.com dictionary, and is defined as:
“Electronic sanitation. Refers to securing a company’s systems and networks against attack.”

ETYM

Cyber - Another example of a raging prefix that we may all soon tire of.

Hygiene - It has been common to talk about cleaning up a computer after a virus attack. Good hygiene is important when dealing with biological infections, including viruses, and I think that the terminology has come from this source. There is even a page devoted to “Digital Hygiene” on the net, but it is on a site named after a nasty spider, so I won’t publicise it any more. Suffice to say that anyone who knows how to use Google can find it themselves.