Some items about WEB 2.0

Composed by Galina Vitkova

In order to make our debate more vivid and more animated I am appending several items about Web 2.0.

The term “Web 2.0” became known after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. According to Tim O’Reilly:

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. “

Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not propose any update to any technical specifications. It is rather about changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.

Nevertheless, Web 2.0 comprises the idea of more widespread application of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content. Building applications and services around the unique features of the Internet are considered Web 2.0 main characteristics.

By O’Reilly four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0 sites could be distinguished:

• Level-3 applications, exist only on the Internet. Examples are eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, AdSense.
• Level-2 applications can operate offline but gain advantages from going online. For example, Flickr benefits from its shared photo-database and from its tag database.
• Level-1 applications operate offline but gain features online (Google Docs & Spreadsheets, iTunes).
• Level-0 applications work as well offline as online. Examples are MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, Gmail.

Basic Characteristics

Web 2.0 websites enable users to build on the interactive facilities of “Web 1.0”. It allows users to run software applications fully through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and control those data. These sites may have a so-called “Architecture of participation” that stimulates users to add value to the application as they use it. It is in contrast to traditional websites, which only limited visitors may view and whose content only the site’s owner could modify. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and xml) and similar client-side interactivity frameworks, or full client-server application frameworks.

According to Best, the characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further essential attributes of Web 2.0 include openness, freedom and collective intelligence in the sense of user participation.

Technology overview

“Web 2.0″ applications are loosely associated with technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production, etc.

Web 2.0 websites usually involve some of the following techniques (sometimes the acronym SLATES is used to refer to them):

Search

the ease of finding information through keyword search which makes the platform valuable.

Links

guide to important pieces of information. The best pages are the most frequently linked to.

Authoring

the ability to create constantly updating content. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that people undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, content is accumulated in posts and comments of blog visitors.

Tags

classification of content by creating tags that are simple, one-word descriptions to facilitate searching and to avoid rigid, pre-made categories.

Extensions

automation of some of the work and pattern matching.

Signals

the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology to inform users about any changes of the content by sending e-mails to them.

Criticism

There is an opinion that “Web 2.0″ does not represent a new version of the World Wide Web at all. In fact, the WEB1 technologies and concepts are constantly applied in WEB2, too. For example, AJAX do not substitute protocols like HTTP, but add a further layer of abstraction on top of them. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, described the term “Web 2.0″ as a “piece of jargon”:

“Nobody really knows what it means…If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Nonetheless, the “WEB 2.0″ service mark was registered at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on June 27, 2006. The European Union application remains currently^[update] pending after its filing on March 23, 2006.

Reference:

Wikipedia, the free enciclopedia

Web 2.0

Presented by Jiří Brabec

There’s no exact definition. Many definitions emerged at conferences about web 2. A suitable way to describe web2 is using keywords.

Technology

Unlike web 1.0, where web pages are built as rigid documents, web 2.0 pages are built to behave more like an application (the Internet is so called a new application platform) for example gmail.com, webmail service.

RIA – rich Internet application (drag-n-drop, flash, interactivity)

No reload of whole page is needed to change its appearance and content. Interactive features such as drag and drop are implemented.

Drag-and-drop– a mechanism that allows a user to select something in one window and drug the selection to another window.

APP (app) – an abbreviation for application

AJAX – asynchronous JavaScript and xml

Decentralization, mashups

Mashups are webs where existing applications are used as a base for additional information (Google maps). This is possible through API.

API – application programming interface, exposure of application functionality to other subjects

Content / new medium

Users participation on content

Community, social websites

Users are connected by unity of their interest (forums of all kinds, facebook, twitter).

Tags/keywords (del.icio.us, digg, linkuj.cz)

Web 2 apps use keywords (tags) to identify and sort content. Users sort out interesting and valuable content themselves.

Content and form separately (xml)

Often you can find exactly the same news on several websites in different design. For example, photos and formatting can be removed. This is useful for mobile devices, rss feeds.

Unique content (sound, video, user comments on goods)

Successful Web 2.0 project must aggregate some unique information updated by users as seen on wikis.

myspace.com, last.fm, ebay.com

Wiki contribution

Collective intelligence - can be considered a form of networking enabled first of all by Web 2.0. Collective Intelligence contributes to enhance the social pool of existing knowledge quantitatively and qualitatively.

Many-to-many relationship

Dialogue of two persons: one-to-one

Public speech: one-to-many relationships

Web 2.0: many-to-many relationships – new medium (advanced technology needed)

Web x.0

Many new features of web are emerging. Developers predicts even web 4.0 version.

Should We Fear the Killer Robots?

Compiled by Galina Vitkova

Here is another technical text about robots, which is presentable for studying. At the same time the text points at serious issues connected with military robots.

Robots have been used in laboratories and factories for many years, but their uses are changing fast. Since the turn of the century, sales of professional and personal service robots have risen sharply and make total 5.5 million in 2008. IFR Statistics estimate 11.5 million in the next two years. The price of robot manufacture is also falling. In 2006 robots cost by 80% cheaper than it was in 1990. Nowadays the robots are entering our lives in unprecedented numbers.

The U.S. will spend $1.7B on military robots

Robots in the military are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They have left the movie screen and entered the battlefield. Washington University in St. Louis’s Doug Few and Bill Smart are on the cutting edge of this new wave of technology. Few and Smart report that the military goal is to have approximately 30% of the Army comprised of robotic forces by approximately 2020.

Nowadays the U.S. military has already deployed about 5 thousands of robot systems in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. military´s killer robots must learn a warior code

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research . The report also includes a discussion of a Terminator–style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters. In fact the report is the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics. It envisages a fast-approaching epoch where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans.

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Dr Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin says, is that modern programs include millions of lines of code and are written by teams of programmers, none of whom knows the entire program. Therefore, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact. Without extensive testing in the field the “right” behaviour of fighting robots can´t be guaranteed. The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.

Who is blame?

If a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” or should they be programmed to preserve their lives?

The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.

A sense of haste among designers may have been heightened by a US congressional mandate that by 2010 a third of all operational “deep-strike” aircraft must be unmanned, and that by 2015 one third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned.

“A rush to market increases the risk for inadequate design or programming. Worse, without a sustained and significant effort to build in ethical controls in autonomous systems there is little hope that the early generations of such systems and robots will be adequate, making mistakes that may cost human lives,” the report noted.

A simple ethical code along the lines of the “Three Laws of Robotics” postulated by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

They were introduced in Asimov’s short story Runaround (1942 or 1950)

References:

• Military’s Killer Robots must Learn Warrior Code — Leo Lewis — The Times, February 16, 2009
• Military 2.0: Should You Fear the Killer Robots? — Eric Stoner — January 29, 2009
• http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5741334.ece

• Report: Autonomous Military Robotics – Risk, Ethics and Design

• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081218141724.htm