| UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER |
Vol 5. . . No 1 . . . September, 1994
Editor: Jamieson McKenzie, Ed.D.
Network 609, 424 14th Street - Suite 202
Bellingham, WA 98225
Telephone 206-647-8759
Internet: jmckenzie@msmail.bham.wednet.edu
Contents
1. Bandwidth Hogs & Other Culprits by JM
2. Local Bandwidth Hogs by JM
3. Firewalls or Censorship? by JM
4. Cruisin' Story by Elaine Winters
5. Virtual Truth: Frequency + Proximity = Value by JM
Copyright Policy: Materials published in From Now On may be duplicated for educational, non-profit school district use only. In any other case, contact the editor for permission.
****************** Bandwidth Hogs & Other Culprits ************ by Jamie McKenzie
Strange as it sounds, there may be some times in this decade of technological marvels and miracles when a picture is not worth a thousand words. The picture may not be worth the bandwidth it requires for transfer or the slowing down it causes on a particular WAN.
For those of us fortunate enough to be creating on-ramps to the electronic highway, pictures - because they are enormous bandwidth hogs - can clog up a WAN (wide area network) like great wads of unwanted sewerage, slowing down the performance of the entire network and blocking access to relatively free and fast- flowing text files.
Perhaps because video flows so cheaply and efficiently across the TV screens of our society we have developed insatiable appetites for full motion video on our PC monitors. We expect full screen, full motion video from CD-ROM encyclopedias, and we frown at text-based front ends to the Internet. "Give us something user-friendly like Mosaic!" cry recent converts fresh from an introductory course. They have tasted impressive Internet graphics (usually projected from a single PC) and they want them on their desktops.
The problem is fairly simple and straight forward. Digitized pictures flowing as data through networks are often huge data files. A text document of 2 pages may require a file of 4K. A full color Edward Hopper painting from the Dallas Museum of Art requires 220K. The text file arrives in "no time at all" - less than a second? The painting, on the other hand, may "take for ever." Using an old 2400 baud modem and standard telephone lines, the painting takes well over an hour to arrive. Special telephone lines meant for digital data transmission when combined with a district "Internet hub" can significantly speed the transmission, but even those lines can be quickly clogged if there are many users.
To give concrete examples, Bellingham presently connects to the Internet through its own Internet hub to the state K-12 educational backbone called "WEDNET." The connection is a 56KB line. It is a "pipe" which can transmit digital data much faster than a home line which requires the translation services (much slower) of a modem. If I am the only district Internet user when I try to download the Hopper painting from Dallas, it takes more than 1 minute on a week day. The same process may be cut in half on a Saturday afternoon as Internet and Wednet traffic subsides. If four users try to load similar images all at the same time, they must each wait 4-6 minutes. Imagine providing Internet access to 1500 desktops with such a 56KB line! We must stick to text at first until we can upgrade to a T1 line when one comes available in January.
A T1 line is a much bigger pipe, offering transmission or receipt of 26 times the data carrried by a single 56KB line. This pipe would allow a single user to download the Hopper painting in just a few seconds, presumably. But even this pipe will not support hundreds of Internet users intent on downloading large graphics files. As soon as 26 users try to download graphics files of 220K, things begin to bog down. We're soon back to minutes.
In a recent Veronica search I conducted to see what issues others were seeing affiliated with bandwidth, I found a lively debate regarding whether or not Mosaic was the culprit.
R. M. Panoff of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Champaign, IL, not suprisingly claims that Mosaic is not the culprit. He blames poor design of WWW pages with too many in-line, large file graphics. He also blames those who encourage groups to download images indiscriminately. Large files can be transmitted with ftp and gopher, he points out. Citation: rpanoff@NCSA.UIUC.EDU Subject: Less on Bandwidth hogs, please
With the geometric increase in user accounts, the highly touted information highway may become as much an oxymoron as the "freeways" which try to meet the rush hour needs of LA. if we are not careful about bandwidth consumption. While some of the graphics available over the Net can be enormously valuable for learning and research purposes, many can be down-loaded and stored locally instead of flushed repeatedly through a crowded pipeline.
School districts designing their own WANs will need to take a careful look at this bandwidth issue. While it is tempting to seek software solutions which limit access and reduce the problem, it will probably be necessary to help both staff and students to understand how their information choices influence the performance of the network both within the district and across the larger Net.
When I first started writing this article, I was predisposed to attack Mosaic. My Veronica search and Dr. Yanoff's piece opened my mind to a different perspective. The real bandwidth hogs are those of us who clog the Net without realizing or caring about how we might be influencing the transmissions of others.
Sitting here on a Saturday, the Net is serving up graphics at nearly three times its usual speed. This made a great impression one me. Mosaic is out there just as it was on Friday. It's the users who are resting.
********** Local Bandwidth Hogs *********
by Jamie McKenzie
This "hurry up and wait" phenomenon has its counterpart when it comes to CD-ROM encyclopedias. Some learning experiences are painfully slow. Working on a stand-alone computer with a mere "double-speed" CD-ROM drive, a student can spend 20-40 per cent of the research time waiting for the machine to open a file. To explore this issue, I tested Microsoft's Enkarta on several different Macs, timed how long various events took and calculated the percentage of wait time for the student.
The research task? "Compare the paintings of 10 different American painters and select your two favorites. Mark all 10 with bookmarks, copy your two favorites, paste them into a PageMaker file and explain your choice."
1. Open Enkarta Mac IISI - 38 secs.
2. Open "Find" and insert "American near painter" as search strategy - 18 seconds of machine wait time. 90 seconds of thinking about choices and keywords. 175 topics found.
3. Browse to identify and bookmark 10 articles with paintings - 6 minutes and 4 seconds of machine wait time. 3 minutes and 18 seconds of thinking (???).
4. Open each bookmark and enlarge painting to full screen - 46 seconds of machine time for each painting. (25 secs with Power Mac) Spend 4 minutes considering the painting.
5. Enlarge and copy a painting to the clipboard - 38 seconds.
6. Open Pagemaker and paste painting to document. One minute of machine time.
As many of us begin to create LANs in buildings connecting classrooms and students to CD-ROM towers, the challenge of serving information out across those networks is complicated by the slowness of the CD-ROM servers themselves and the impact of huge image files on products which care designed for stand-alone computers and a home market intent on impressive graphics.. A recent review of CD-ROM enclyclopedias ignored the issue of whether or not an encyclopedia could be networked. The product rated lowest (for its lack of special effects) was the only one which works well on a network.
CD-ROM products are quite the rage. And for good reason. We can serve an excellent encyclopedia out across all the desktops in a single school for just $1100. But there are also many cases where the performance of a product is dismal on the kinds of machines available in most schools. It does little good to offer students slow CDs on slow CD-ROM servers. "Hurry up and wait!" is hardly desirable. It is not enough to assess the value of a CD-ROM's content, visuals and special effects. We must also try the products on the machines our students will be using and ask just how long must they wait.
***************** Firewalls or Censorship? *******************
by Jamie McKenzie
At a recent conference sponsored by Apple, a corporate vice president kicked off the day by lauding AppleSearch - a software program meant to deliver WAIS services from the Internet to desktops through Apple file servers - as a "firewall" to protect school employees from "firing" and protect students from various harmful and dangerous materials available to those who "surf" the Net without such software guidance. The sales pitch emphasized the beauties of natural language searching (discussed in the next section) while striking an ominous and quite derogatory tone regarding less restricted access to the Internet.
For those of us who have successfully shepherded students onto the electronic highway and expected them to stay away from potentially offensive materials, the tone of the remarks seemed alarmist. The sales strategy seemed inappropriate. The message seemed . . . well . . . un-Apple-like. Is the sky really falling?
Remember those guys in the garage who dreamed of micro-computers revolutionizing the lives of average citizens by putting information power in their hands? Recall John Sculley's vision of knowledge navigators sailing through vast islands of infomation?
Suddenly the script reads more like "Barbarians at the Gate."
While there may be regions of the country where fear of information and the Net reigns supreme, it is hardly appropriate for a corporation to fan the flames of such fears with warnings of "firings." Those who fret that pornography will spew forth across the screens of kindergarten classroom monitors know little about bandwidth hogs and the challenges of FTP. Sure there is objectionable material available on the Net if the user makes a special effort to find it, but most home cable TV offers far more impressive, sexually explicit graphics with far less effort.
At a second session, a second Apple presenter handed out materials which stated, "Hook up, log in, get Fired." Another slide in the handout offered, "Safe(r) computing with AppleSearch: WAIS access, selected databases, managed access."
The main thrust of Apple's sales pitch is the ease with which school personnel may restrict students to (allegedly) carefully screened materials. School librarians, we are told, may identify "safe" WAIS servers and aim the information pipeline to just those sources.
What ever happened to the ALA Bill of Rights, which clearly upholds the principle of freedom of access to information? What becomes the basis for determining what is "safe?" Do certain political views get excluded? Who decides? Who will even know what was excluded? And would those sources really be safe or just seem safe on the surface?
While all of us must achieve a balanced relationship with our families and community regarding the potentially offensive materials available to those who drive onto the Internet, some of us who have offered student accounts and "surfing" tied to parent permission forms have found the dangers, the anxiety and the fear greatly exaggerated. In a democratic society, censorship and broad scale limitations on access to information are unacceptable. While schools must guide student use, especially at early ages, they must be careful about restricting access.
This nation was formed by people fleeing the tyranny of state religions and state truths. As we lead young ones through the initiation rites of citizenship, we open doors and windows to a world of conflicting opinions and statements, teaching them and trusting them to make i
The Internet is much more than an electronic highway to entertainment and sports statistics. For our generation and the next century, telecommunications, broadly conceived and free of undue restrictions by corporate entities, may provide the dramatic kind of support for a democratic society that Tom Paine once expected from the printing press.
As Vic Sussman puts it in US News & World Report (1/17/94, Vol. 116 Issue 2, p55):
"Freedom, it seems, has become the ultimate Internet worm, burrowing into 100 countries and 10,000 computer networks, settling into the ethos of this wired world of 15 million users."
Sussman quotes Mike Godwin, legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Cyberspace may give freedom of speech more muscle than the First Amendment does." Indeed, it may already "have become literally impossible for a government to shut people up."
Shall schools open their electronic doors and windows to the world, allowing students access to the highway and the freedom of information, or shall we install screens and barriers and dark shades and shutters to keep out the light? I hope we do the first.
****************** Cruisin' Story ***************************
by Elaine Winters,
Interactive Instructional Designer,
Cross-Cultural Communications: elwin1525 @ AOL.com,
geographically in Berkeley, CA, USA
I've been cruising around, as many of us do, on and off the net, reviewing the CD-ROM mountain that grows hourly.
As person professionally devoted to the notion of interactivity, I'm a bit struck by the lack of true engagement. Gaming seems to (mostly) consist of Star Wars adaptations, or explorations of one kind or another that involve mouse clicking with random reason. Edutainment? It seems like lackluster entertainment and where 'education' comes into it, remains a mystery.
As an Instructional Designer, who has had the opportunity of working cross culturally, I know that the concept of teaching by story is universal. It provides a vehicle for imparting information and, it is a tested way of mentoring.
I also know, that in doing business, the Japanese, and others, use 'talk story' as a means of communicating information that might otherwise cause the listener to 'lose face.'
Where have all those story/mentoring models gone?
Why not use this flexible medium to mentor the next generation, on an international, cross cultural level? The AI folks should be able to help us out here. Capturing the wisdom of this generation and passing it on to the future in an electronic archive (a virtual library!), can only benefit our species, and assist us with our monumental planetary survival tasks.
Wisdom can be 'key worded' and the learner can access via computer, source material which are lifetimes of experience, talents, history as it happened, the evolution of law, the various ways humans have solved the problems of survival, to say nothing of art, music, etc.
This is truly information available as needed, when needed.
A manager can send a new team member to the cultural/business history archive of the company; the team member selects information about the specific tasks that need accomplishing. The trials and errors need not be repeated; building on past success can happen.
Students, at any grade level, can produce documentaries on whatever they are assigned, or interests them; the raw material, from many perspectives is there for the assembly. Scripts developed, videos edited, experts 'consulted' , efforts of previous explorers in that particular realm can be obtained - - sounds like learning to me.
Anyone working in these directions? Where are you? Who are you?
responses & comments to: elwin1525@aol.com
************** Virtual Truth: Frequency + Proximity = Value ***********
by Jamie McKenzie
In previous issues of From Now On I have shared concerns about the hidden logic behind what software people call "natural language" searches. The issue is whether or not the person conducting the search understands how little the computer might understand and how unskillful the computer might be.
AppleSearch, according to the vice president mentioned above, uses two main strategies for identifying articles in a database. It counts how often certain words appear in each article and it considers how close they appear to each other. The premise is that the more frequent the appearance of the words and the closer they are to one another, the more valuable the article must be. The computer searches, counts hits, weighs proximity and then ranks the articles from 5 stars down to 1 star - something like restaurant ratings.
When the VP demonstrated the searching, he cut the list off at the top 20 articles as if the others would not be worth scanning.
Those who have done much searching will quickly tell you that frequency and proximity tell you little about value. A verbose and opinionated fool's diatribe, unrestrained and redundant, would tend to score more highly than one crafted with a good thesaurus. Numbers of words do not tell much about the quality of thought, the weight of evidence or the structure of an argument. They tell little of an author's credentials or credibility. They reveal little conflict of interest, bias or affiliation.
It is quite likely that some of the most insightful and provocative articles might be missed if one only read the top twenty identified with these two criteria.
Another concern with natural language searching is the separation from the logical implications of various word choices.
In locating articles related to the declining salmon harvest in the Northwest, certain words (just like different kinds of nets and hooks) lead to different catches of articles.
"Salmon and fishing" leads to quite a different collection than "Salmon and overfishing" or "Salmon and fishery."
Ultimately, info-glut may obscure the truth while offering "fool's gold."
Can you imagine selecting an Italian restaurant by counting the number of times "pasta" appears on the menu? Would it rate five stars if the word "pasta" appeared in proximity to the word "sauce?"
Those who search for insight, rather than mere information, know full well that one must scan through dozens of articles which may contain few hits but a few gems. One must continue to "read" articles. We cannot rely upon machines to do our thinking for us.