Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 12/29/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“THE BIG ISSUES”
by David Cameron, leader of Britain’s Conservative Party
“We are now seven years into the 21st century and the peoples of the West must wake up to a new reality. We may be conditioned, historically and culturally, to regard ourselves as being at the epicenter of human progress, but what was true in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries will not be true of this one – and ours is the generation that will have to deal with it…
“The first great challenge we face is the urgent need to protect our planet. Without action on the environment, conflicts between nations and ideologies, however profound, are mere self-indulgence. The threat of climate change is real and the costs of failing to act are huge. Those costs are financial and social, as well as environmental – and, while they fall on all countries, they will hurt poorer countries the most…
“We need to champion green growth – economic growth that helps rather than harms the environment. We must find solutions to climate change that support rather than obstruct the aspirations of India and other countries for faster economic growth and rising prosperity…
“The third great challenge that we face is international security. We need a sense of balance, proportion and wisdom in handling the complex and dangerous challenges of foreign and security policy in the 21st century. In particular, we require both implacable resolve and fine judgment in tackling the greatest threat to our security – terrorism. It is our duty to find and defeat those responsible for planning international terror, to do everything can to stop further outrages and, in our broader response, to make the world safer for the future…
“These challenges and how we respond to them will define life for our children and grandchildren. Opting out is not an option – all of us need to be prepared.”
“DON’T BET AGAINST THE INTERNET. IT’S SIMPLY THE BEST,”
argues Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
The internet is much more than a technology – it’s a completely different way of organizing our lives. But its success is built on technological superiority: protocols and open standards that are ingenious in their simplicity. Time after time they have trounced rival telecommunications standards that made perfect commercial sense to companies but no practical sense to consumers…
“But what’s surprising is that so many companies are still betting against the net, trying to solve toady’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity…
“In 2007 we’ll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phones grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today’s desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools and editing capability that best suit their needs.
“Driving this change is a profound technological shift in computer science. For the past 20 years a client-server computing architecture has dominated digital infrastructures. Expensive PCs ran complex software programs and relied primarily on proprietary protocols to connect to bigger – and even more expensive – mainframe servers. The data and the power lived in these computers and their operating systems.
“Today we live in the clouds. We’re moving into the era of ‘cloud’ computing, with information and applications hosted in the diffuse atmosphere of cyberspace rather than on specific processors and silicon racks. The network will truly be the computer…
“Cloud computing is hardly perfect: internet-based services aren’t as reliable and there is often no way to use them offline. But the direction is clear. Simplicity is triumphing over complexity. Accessibility is beating exclusivity. Power is increasingly in the hands of the user.
“These trends have three important consequences. First, most new applications can be created using existing software and protocols. Reinvention can be even more powerful and pervasive than invention. Mash-ups – websites that use existing online content to create something entirely new – are becoming the norm…”
Second, competition has increased and intensified. That stimulates innovation and ensures that products improve faster and become cheaper. If they don’t, users go to a new entrant offering free or better versions.
Third, the creation, consumption and communication of content have increased exponentially. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley estimate that the world generated five exabytes of data in 2002, double the output in 1999. To translate that into something more familiar, absorbing five exabytes of data on TV would require sitting in front of a screen for 40,700 years…
“Trend is not destiny, of course. But as a no-nonsense sports writer once wrote during the depth of America’s Depression, ‘The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.’ We’re betting on the internet because we believe that there’s a bull market in imagination online.”
“WELCOME TO THE SEMANTIC WEB”
by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium
“Today, digital information about nearly every aspect of our lives is being created at an astonishing rate. Hidden amid all of these data is the key to knowledge about how to cure diseases, make more money and govern our world more effectively. Yet the technical tools and social practices that shape the way we manage, share, integrate and analyse this under-used treasure trove are sorely out of date. The good news is that a number of technical innovations (with names like AJAX, XML, RDF and OWL) along with new social arrangements regarding data are advancing the world wide web towards what we call the Semantic Web.
“Progress towards better data integration will happen using the same basic technology that has made the world wide web so successful: the link. The power of the web today, including the ability to find information quickly, derives from the fact that people publish documents in standard formats, and then link them together. The value of the web increases in more than linear fashion with the number of links; this has been called the ‘network effect.’ The Semantic Web will derive its power in a similar way, but through the linking of data rather than documents…
“So readers should take the following homework assignment for 2007 from this article: make an inventory of the data you are responsible for and think about which parts would be most likely to be re-used if you were to share them on a corporate intranet or on the internet using Semantic Web standards. Just as in the early days of the web ten years ago, the advances in data integration will benefit all those who contribute, often in unexpected ways.”
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