"Helping" your brain

How much would you pay to have a small memory chip implanted in your brain if that chip would double the capacity of your short-term memory? Or guarantee that you would never again forget a face or a name?

There’s good reason to consider such offers. Although our memories are sometimes spectacular — we are very good at recognizing photos, for example — our memory capacities are often disappointing. Faulty memories have been known to lead to erroneous eyewitness testimony (and false imprisonment), to marital friction (in the form of overlooked anniversaries) and even death (sky divers have been known to forget to pull their ripcords — accounting, by one estimate, for approximately 6 percent of sky-diving fatalities). The dubious dynamics of memory leave us vulnerable to the predations of spin doctors (because a phrase like “death tax” automatically brings to mind a different set of associations than “estate tax”), the pitfalls of stereotyping (in which easily accessible memories wash out less common counterexamples) and what the psychologist Timothy Wilson calls “mental contamination.” To the extent that we frequently can’t separate relevant information from irrelevant information, memory is often the culprit.

All this becomes even more poignant when you compare our memories to those of the average laptop. Whereas it takes the average human child weeks or even months or years to memorize something as simple as a multiplication table, any modern computer can memorize any table in an instant — and never forget it. Why can’t we do the same?

Much of the difference lies in the basic organization of memory. Computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations, with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map, but we have no idea where anything in our brains is stored. We retrieve information not by knowing where it is but by using cues or clues that hint at what we are looking for.

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Regulating the Internet Traffic

If the Internet is a highway, then the companies responsible for maintaining the roads are increasingly at odds with the ones producing a lot of the traffic. Comcast throttling BitTorrent traffic as a way to protect network integrity (or so it says) is one example. Another can be found in the arguments of a British ISP that’s seeking to get the BBC to pay for network upgrades, claiming the broadcaster’s iPlayer is hogging too much bandwidth.

The request for funding to build more robust networks made by Simon Gunter, chief of strategy at ISP Tiscali, is akin to asking car companies to pay a tax for building more roads. It’s one way to address the issue, but there are other options, among them better traffic management, which would decrease the distance cars need to travel.

It’s an evil phrase, but necessary in a world in which backhaul is limited and fiber to the home is still a luxury. Recall that the FCC had no problem with Comcast engaging in network management practices, but rather that Comcast “managed” a specific application without disclosing that fact to consumers. And the application attacked was competing with Comcast’s own cable offerings.

Many of these media files are delivered via peer-to-peer networks. They’ve long been the most efficient way to get large amounts of data across a network, and now they’re working hard to be even more efficient. Nine months ago, Verizon and Pando Networks stepped up to create the Peer 4 Peer working group, which is trying to create a standardized protocol through which P2P firms and ISPs could work together. The idea was that sharing an ISP’s network topology would help P2P companies route traffic in ways that are advantageous to both the ISP and the end user. Results included a 235 percent increase in delivery speeds in the U.S. and keeping more traffic inside an ISP’s own network.

The other way to reduce traffic involves each P2P company making tweaks to their software.
At some point new roads will have to be built. But in the meantime, there are ways to prevent network congestion that don’t involve kicking certain cars off the road.

Not only new roads, but small "cars".
File compression in my opinion will have a big role in the future of the Internet highway.

Where is Yahoo going?

When Microsoft started hunting Yahoo in February, many assumed that the software behemoth would bag the company swiftly and efficiently. Yahoo seemed to be classic weak Web prey, wobbling financially while rival Google continued to dominate the online world. Now, just days after Microsoft's threat to take its modest offer directly to shareholders, Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang is fighting back.


Rumors are flying that Yahoo is teaming up with AOL, the long-suffering Internet division of Time Warner (which is also the parent company of TIME), as a way to stave off an unwanted merger. At the same time, there are reports that Microsoft is buddying up with News Corp. so that the two companies can increase Yahoo's offering price and corner their catch. While many industry watchers still believe that Microsoft will gobble up Yahoo eventually, chances are it will have to pay a lot more for its meal.

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Can you hide something from Google?

The better question might be, what doesn't Google know about us, according to Gartner analysts.

LAS VEGAS -- Google knows almost everything connected to the Web, but there is one major source of untapped data the company has scarcely touched to date. Can you guess that area?

If you cried "e-commerce transactions" you would be right, according to analysts at the Gartner Symposium ITexpo 2008 here April 10.

Thanks to a powerful database management system and corresponding technologies, the company is able to access just about anything that hasn't been encrypted, said Gartner analyst Richard Hunter in his presentation on what kind of information Google corrals on the world.

The one area where Google isn't particularly strong is in e-commerce transactions, where its Google Checkout platform sees only about 1 percent of what is sold on the Internet.

"This is obviously an area of great interest for them because so much of their current revenue is devised of advertising," Hunter said.

The conversation shed a new light on the rumor that Google could buy online travel power Expedia. Some financial analysts applauded this notion, while others booed the premise. The naysayers claimed Google would be broadening its business too much, while the cheerleaders claimed Google would be able to tap a new world of advertising.

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No from Norwegia to pirate-chasers

At the end of March we reported that the MPAA’s pirate-chasing lawyer Espen Tøndel sent a letter demanding that Norwegian ISPs disconnect file-sharers from the Internet. Unfortunately for him, the ISPs aren’t going to comply and have issued a letter in response, refusing to break the law to please copyright holders.

It’s becoming a trend for outfits such as the IFPI, MPAA, BPI and their equivalents to demand that ISPs disconnect their file-sharing customers from the internet. Unfortunately for them, ISPs don’t want to play ball with these demands and are starting to make their opinions known while refusing to be bullied. Even the European Parliament thinks that disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet is disproportionate.

When Simonsen Advokatfirma sent a letter to Norwegian ISPs via the MPAA’s lawyer Espen Tøndel, it was probably expected that the ISPs would agree to their outrageous demands. Not so. Instead, IKT Norway - an interest group for ISPs - stood up for the ISPs stating:

“In a constitutional state, the police and the prosecuting authority have the job of investigating and indicting, not lawyers and communication engineers. Most of the big ISPs in Norway are members of IKT Norway and we will support the various ISPs as best we can against what we see as a preposterous demand from Simonsen”

Now, in a detailed letter, IKT Norway has responded in the strongest possible way.

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