Month: May 2007

regulatory clarity

To be certified to referee nine-year old girls and boys basketball in a local league, I took a rules exam with about 40 other applicants. Most of them were 12-14 year-old kids.

The exams were collected and graded on the spot. The names of persons who passed were then called out. One by one the youngsters got up, picked up their newly issued referee’s whistle, and left (usually with their parents). I was left sitting alone at a table, with just a few other kids spread around the cafeteria.

I failed. I didn’t realize there were special rules for this particular children’s league, so I hadn’t learned them. This is probably the first exam I have ever failed. With the bonus feature of public humiliation in front of children. Well, at least I didn’t cry.

And I didn’t give up. I passed that exam on the second try. Now I’ve passed another exam that qualifies me to referee recreational basketball for older children.

Studying the rules of basketball has given me new appreciation for regulation. Consider this sentence from Rule 7-6-1:

The throw-in pass shall touch another player (inbounds or out of bounds) on the court before going out of bounds untouched.

I doubt that the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations has any short text as conceptually convoluted as this.

Not only golf, but also basketball, clearly needs help from government regulators.

technology's tracks

The Vienna Depot, sitting in the midst of the Northern Virginia high-technology corridor, is an easily overlooked monument to human ingenuity in designing signaling and switching systems. Alexandria, Loudoun & Hampshire Railroad constructed the Vienna Depot in 1859. In 1911, it became part of the Washington & Old Dominion (W&OD) Railroad. The Depot remained in operation until 1968. The Depot now sits along the beautiful W&OD recreation trail.

Like the Internet, railroads depend on a geographically distributed signaling and switching network. In its early history, the Vienna Depot probably included a telegraph line to help coordinate the movement of trains along the rail system. Because it wasn’t on a junction of rail lines, the Vienna Depot didn’t function like a core router. It was more like a town border gateway protocol manager. Trains that entered and left Vienna probably did so under the control of the Vienna Depot.

Computers integrate into one functional device complex signaling and switching systems. A computer is like a miniature railroad. Within it, devices signal to each other, contend for pathways, and attempt to avoid crashes. Crashes within computers tend, fortunately, to be a lot less lethal than railroad crashes.

Model railroading has a direct historical connection to the development of computers. The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), founded at MIT in 1947, included figures active in the development of the first computers. The TMRC’s layout featured an elaborate application of switching technology:

By 1962, TMRC’s legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity (and was to grow further over the next thirty years). The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were SCRAM switches located at numerous places around the room that could be pressed to stop the trains’ movement if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going full-bore at an obstruction. [Wikipedia]

More importantly, modeling railroading shows that technology can be fun, that building systems can be an enjoyable social activity, and that tinkerers, hackers, and hobbyists can create astonishing work. This spirit of technical fun, camaraderie and public spiritedness, and decentralized initiative was central to early personal computer development and continues within the ever expanding technological activity on the Internet.

The Northern Virginia Model Railroaders (NVMR) have built within the Vienna Depot a stunningly elaborate layout of the Western North Carolina railroad. In 1976, shortly after the Vienna Depot was abandoned, the NVMR began to renovate the Depot under a far-sighted agreement with the Town of Vienna. To produce the layout as it now exist must have taken NVMR members many hours of work. That is, many hours of fun.

The NVMR layout in the Vienna Depot is a great monument of technology. The club regularly hosts an Open House for a steady stream of young and old visitors. The video above gives you some views of the railroad, but it is much better experienced first-hand. Check it out!

network micro-geography

Economic activity is not distributed uniformly (or randomly) across space. Economic activity has long been highly concentrated in cities. Moreover, larger city size is associated with a greater rate of innovation.[1] The exact mechanism by which concentration of person in geographic space fosters innovation is not well-understood, but the effect is clear.

Community-based networks, such as open public local access networks (OPLANs), make cities more important features of network macro-geography. In discussions of investments in community-based networks, interconnection between community-based networks tends to receive relatively little attention. That’s unfortunate. Just as the a city’s relationship to ports, airports, and interstate highways has a major effect on its development, the same is true for a community network in relation to more geographically comprehensive network structures.

What about geography at the scale of community-based networks? Malcolm J. Matson, who developed the concept of an OPLAN in 1984, has emphasized that an OPLAN has a more uniform topography than the historical telco switching-office hierarchy. Two typical characteristics of an OPLAN are:

  • service and content ‘providers’ are not differentiated from service and content ‘consumers’. Any party connected to or using the OPLAN can freely assume either role. …
  • global connectivity beyond the OPLAN is achieved (as at present) through any telecoms operator or ISP who directly or via an interconnect agreement, has access to a trunk fibre (or satellite) which serves any building (subject to planning constraints) connected to the OPLAN (i.e. the OPLAN is ‘unbundled end-to-end’)[2]

The ideal is that “any point on the network is as good a place for content or application origination as any other.”[3] The intention seems to be to avoid the economic power that control of end-offices gives telcos.

Eliminating geographic concentrations of network-based activities, like eliminating cities, is neither possible nor desirable. Particular points in a community network are likely to become more desirable points for network interconnection and for application and content hosting. The challenge is to get a geographic structure that serves the common good, not the interests of a particular company.

Some related work:

  • Ideas for geographically comprehensive lattice of competing, independently owned network interconnection points
  • Thinking about structural reform for communications networks

Notes:

[1] Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West (2007), “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 104 n. 17 (April 24) pp. 7301-7306.

[2] Malcolm J. Matson (2004), “The Open Public Local Access Network: The Concept and Emerging Realization,” White Paper.

[3] Id. p. 18.