from the horizon

Although this may have appear to have little to do with the regular subject matter on my blog, it’s a hot topic at the moment and I want to write about some related stuff, so I thought I’d write a brief intro piece about it.

What is Web 2.0? That’s actually a good question. There is no clear answer, and many people have different ideas about what it is. Web 2.0 is used to describe new uses of the internet, where users participate in generating the content, not just as passive consumers. Blogs (such as this one), Wikipedia, TradeMe/EBay, YouTube and MySpace are all examples of websites which exist because of the regular internet users posting information on them. This is significant enough to inspire Time magazine to name Internet Users as the Time Person of the Year for 2006 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html).

I think Web 2.0 is all about dequantization. Traditionally information was quantized, coming from a limited number of sources, due to the costs involved in publishing/distributing/broadcasting. Now thanks to the internet we are getting an explosion in the amount of information and the sources from which we can get that information.

There are a number of key ideas behind Web 2.0, and I’ll go through them with some examples: Read the rest of this entry �

Arriving back in Banda Aceh, it realized it really was my second home. It’s not only familiar and comfortable here, but beautiful. The palm trees, the rice paddies, and the people. The Acehnese people are just so friendly. Walking down the street I am greeted with confetti of smiles and “Hello Mister”s. And I was coming back to all the friends I had made while I was last here.

In Banda Aceh I am working on a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) database. I have talked about this before in my blog, but I’ll go over it again, and try to relate it to my quantization rant. I’m no M&E expert, but this is the way I see things:

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Arriving in Singapore was easy. It just works: the subway, using my credit card, people speaking English, my hotel reservation.
I had to get my Indonesian visa here, and although I found it a little unusual to hand my passport complete with $160 over to a complete stranger, who I met outside a McDonalds, everything worked smoothly, and I had my visa on the same day.

In my quest to buy a laptop in Singapore, I found myself at the Comex computer and electronic expo. I found the 4 massive halls filled with electronics slightly overwhelming. The amount of money that was being spent; the cost of some of the products there. I ogled the plasma screens, with their screens which were so life like, showing the same unbelievable Hollywood movies. But I couldn’t help thinking: where are the donkeys?

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Billboard on the expressway between Islamabad and Peshawar. It seems more out of place than me. Laugh.

On my last weekend in Peshawar my friend Bakht, took me around the Old City in Peshawar. We walked around the narrow streets, past the stores selling gold, spices, tea, leather, metalwork, meat and a variety of plastic goods imported from China. The streets were filling with people, autorickshaws, donkeys, horse and carts, cars and a fragrance that told me where I was.

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I’ve had a difficult time deciding whether to put the following stories together in a single post, or in separate posts.
Initially I was going to put all of them jumbled all together, because that’s how it felt for me, I was traveling fast and and doing a lot. It was stressful. All these different experiences and places, with no connection to each other, except through me.

But for the sake of my viewers, I’ve decided to separate the stories into nice post sized samples. I figure that’s how a blog works: nice small pieces of text, nothing to heavy to digest. Small sample size, high sample frequency. I should have them updated over the next couple of days. I hope you can piece it all together (or not, and appreciate it).
Personally, writing this post helped me link the samples to together and get my signal tuned back in.

This post is slight branch from my typical journal entries, but it’s some thinking I’ve been doing, and I think it may give some reference for the next post (and possibly more). For those of who don’t know, I’m a computer systems engineer by initial training, so apologies if this gets too technical. I’ll try and keep it as simple as possible. So if you’ll sit with me for the next five minutes, I’ll try to tell you about quantization loss and why I think it’s important.

I was first introduced to the theory of quantization loss in a course at university. Quantization is the process where an analog signal is converted into a digital signal. An analog signal is a continuous signal, varying continuously over time. A digital signal is sampled at discrete points in time, and each sample can only have a discrete value. An analog signal can contain an infinite amount of information, a digital signal cannot. Inherently, there is a loss of information in this process of converting analog to digital. Hopefully the following graph will make this clearer:

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