Miguel PdL

IEEE Spectrum: Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong
I’ve read with interest this article recently published in the July 2006 IEEE Spectrum magazine, which refutes Metcalfe’s Law that states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of users on the system, and proposes an alternative which states that the value of a communications network of size n grows in proportion to n log(n). They do highlight that this is a growth law, which means it cannot predict the value of a network from its size alone, but has to know the valuation of a network at one particular size. It can then estimate its value at any future size.
Why is it interesting. Well it’s starts to put in perspecific how the communication network will effect Web 2.0.
The article also gives the currently popular thesis called The Long Tail, some validity.
There are also some other communcation laws not cosidered by these articles which should be, such as Gilder’s and Cooper’s Laws on network bandwidth and the effectiveness of wireless spectrum utilisation in personal communications, as noted in the article Laying Down the Law
Which leans me towards how future wireless networks may effect a create a new law.
For further unrivalled comments have a look at the good folks at Slashdot, in which they have Metcalfe’s Law Refutation Explained

Welcome | Science Commons
I’m been recently submitting a textual document contribution made by me (TSSG) on behalf of a loose consortium into an open forum. Copyright is the item on my mind and so its brought me to reviewing Science Commons, which wasn’t really clear enough for me, but I found a really good resource on a description of Open Access by Peter Suber.
In this explaination, he mentions OA initiatives which focus on publicly-funded research, and goes on to mention the 30+ nations that have signed the Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding.
Have Ireland signed up?
They sure have and I cannot help feel that it has some relationship to the recently released Strategy for Science,Technology and Innovation 2006 – 2013
It looks like discussion in Ireland is happening such as this event at the Royal Irish Academy on the 12th of April 2006. “Enabling Open Access to Scientific Data and Information within the Modern Knowledge Economy; the Case for a Scientific Commons”

SATN.org: Learning from the history of railroads
I’ve always had a long held held theory about the relationship between the railroad transport network and the internet transport network and to my thoughts on how history runs in cycles, and how lessons can be learned from the past.
Now an item that has come back onto my TD list is
Notes on history of transportation in the EU.
Okay a quick search later and maybe I should set my sights a little lower to the
history of rail in Ireland.
And a little while later to ERRAC and the Strategic Rail Research Agenda for Europe, which can be found off of the ERRAC documents page

6th IEEE International Workshop on IP Operations and Management
I’ve been reviewing a couple of papers for the IPOM workshop which is part of Manweek 2006, which is covering research topics in the area of network and services management. This year being organised in Dublin (Ireland), by the TSSG.
It’s always good to spend some time reviewing papers as I learned about
The history of Net-SNMP
The emulator QEMU
The status stages in the IETF RFC process, which I must admit I was still not a hundred percent sure about until I got to RFC2026 and STD0001
OSPF Incremental SPF
Dijkstra’s algorithm and A* algorithm

IST Results – Securing Europe’s future information society
Two in a day. SecurIST is a project I have actively contributed to, and is run by our good selves here art the TSSG. It’s great to see it get such public recognition.
This news item is really in place to help look for feedback on the European Security & Dependability Task Force recommenadtions for FP7 in the nine thematic security areas of
* Empowerment of the various types of Stakeholder, and in particular of Citizens:
* Europe-specific Security and Dependability:
* Infrastructure Robustness and Availability:
* Interoperability:
* Processes for developing more secure and dependable systems:
* Security and Dependability Preservation:
* User-centric security and dependability standardization:
* Security and Dependability of Service Oriented Architectures:
* Technologies for security

As a follow on to the piece on Daidalos I’m just wondering if this is the tipping point towards moving towards a truely pervassive world?
At the Royal Belfast Hospital their new wireless voice and data infrastructure has just been recognised as the Best Enterprise Deployment for the public sector at the prestigious Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards 2006 and Public Sector Project of the Year at the Techworld Awards 2006.

IST Results – Seamless technology provides unprecedented mobile communication
An EU research project close to my heart has been covered on the IST Results site. I’ve been involved with Daidalos WP5 for 2 years now.
The key deliverables from the integration activities and input from the TSSG has been
D512
Conformance Tests Specifications
D521
First Phase Integration Report
D531
First Phase Evaluation Report
D541
First Phase Recommendation Report
All the Daidalos deliverables can be seen and downloaded from here

World Cup’s Mobile TV Far From a Success
I did want to see how this panned out, and the results seem unsurprising (jerkiness and blur). Unfortunatly one of the supporting items linked inside this article to Mobile Europe is a subscription only page, when I look at it, it is a promotion of a test carried out by a particular company’s “mobile service” testing product.

I spotted this news item on a New US/Ireland Research Partnership and in looking into the programme further on the Intertrade Ireland website I found it is currently only open to
* Diabetes
* Emerging Respiratory Infections
* Cystic Fibrosis
* Nanotechnology
* Sensors
However I thought I’d share it with you anyway just in case ICT is covered in the future.