This Blog has Moved to NovaSpivack.com

The Ontology Integration Problem

The OWL language, and tools such as Protege and TopBraid Composer make it easy to design ontologies. But what about the problem of integrating disparate ontologies? I haven't really found a good solution for this yet.

In my own experience designing a number of OWL ontologies (500 classes - 3000 classes on average) it has often been easier to create my own custom ontology branches to cover various concepts than to try to integrate other ontologies of those concepts into my own.

One of the reasons for this is that each ontology has it's own naming conventions, philosophical orientation, domain nuances, design biases and tradeoffs, often guided by particular people and needs that drove their creation. Integrating across these different worldviews and underlying constraints is often hard. Simply stating that various classes or properties are equivalent is not necessarily a solution because thier inheritance may not in fact be equivalent and thus they may actually be semantically quite different in function, regardless of expressions of equivalence. OWL probably needs to be a lot more expressive in defining mappings between ontologies to truly resolve such subtle problems.

The alternative to mapping -- importing external ontologies into your own -- is also not great because it usually results in redundancies, as well as inconsistent naming conventions and points of view. As you keep adding colors to your pallete, it starts to become kind of brown. If the goal is to make ontologies that are elegant, easy to maintain, extend, understand and apply, importing ontologies into other ontologies doesn't seem to be the way to accomplish that. Different ontologies usually don't  fit together well, or even at all in some cases.

Workin Hard and Making Progress

Sorry I didn't post much today. I pulled an all-nighter last night working on Web-mining algorithms and today we had back to back meetings all day.

I just came back from a really good product team meeting facilitaed by Chris Jones on our product messaging. It's really getting simple, direct, clear and tangible. Very positive. It all makes sense.

It's pretty exciting around here these days -- a lot of pieces we have been working on for months and even years are falling into place and there's a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-it's-parts effect kicking in. The vision is starting to become real -- we really are making a new dimension of the Web, and it's not just an idea, it's something that actually works and we're playing with it in the lab. It's visual, tangible, and useful.

Another cool thing today was a presentation by Peter Royal, about the work he and Bob McWhirter have done architecting our distributed grid. For those of you who don't know, part of our system is a homegrown distributed grid server architecture for massive-scale semantic search. It's not the end-product, but it's something we need for our product. It's kind of our equivalent of Google's backend -- only semantically aware. Like Google, our distributed server architecture is designed to scale efficiently to large numbers of nodes and huge query loads. What's hard, and what's new about what we have done, is that we've accomplished this for much more complex data than the simple flat files that Google indexes. In a way you could say that what this enables is the database equivalent of what Google has done for files. All of us in the presentation were struck by how elegantly designed the architecture is.

I couldn't help grinning a few times in the meeting because there is just so much technology there -- I'm really impressed by what the team has built. This is deep tech at its best. And it's pretty cool that a small company like ours can actually build the kind of system that can hold it's own against the backends of the major players out there. We're talking hundreds of thousands of lines of Java code.

It's really impressive to see how much my team has built. It just goes to show that a small team of really brilliant engineers can run circles around much larger teams.

And to think, just a few years ago there were only three of us with nothing but a dream.

Good Meeting With Shel Israel

Today our product team met with Shel Isreal to show him the alpha version of what we are building here at Radar Networks and get his feedback. Shel had a lot of good insights. We showed him our full product and explained the vision, and gave him a tour of the new dimension of the Web that we are building. We also showed him how content providers such as bloggers and other site creators, and content consumers, can benefit by joining this system. Then we asked him how he would describe it.

Shel suggested that one way to express the benefit of our product is that it helps content creators, like bloggers, become part of more conversations. "Conversation" is a key word for Shel, as many of you know. He views the Web as a network of conversations, not just a network of content. In a sense, content is a means to an end -- conversation -- rather than an end in itself. So from that perspective we are advancing the state-of-the-art in conversations (broadly speaking, not just in the sense of discussions, but in the sense of connecting people and information together in smarter ways). That's an interesting take on what we are doing that I hadn't really thought about.

Shel also suggested that even though we are still a ways from being ready to launch the beta, he thought what we had was "so much better than anything he has seen" that we should start talking about it more -- without getting into the actual details of how we are doing it (gotta save something for later, after all!).

I'll explain more in future posts.

A Good Article on Lack of Search Privacy

This article from the Guardian raises the red flag about the vast amount of personal information that search engines are collecting, and the risks to individual privacy that entails. The article was really well written and made some good points. I've blogged about my thoughts about this issue in a previous post.

Radar Networks is Seeking Search Engineers for Large-Scale Web Mining Initiative

My company, Radar Networks, is building a very large dataset by crawling and mining the Web. We then apply a range of new algorithms to the data (part of our secret sauce) to generate some very interesting and useful new information about the Web. We are looking for a few experienced search engineers to join our team -- specifically people with hands-on experience designing and building large-scale, high-performance Web crawling and text-mining systems. If you are interested, or you know anyone who is interested or might be qualified for this, please send them our way. This is your chance to help architect and build a really large and potentially important new system. You can read more specifics abour our open jobs here.

Another Tip for Entrepreneurs: On Raising Venture Capital -- You Don't Need Finders!!!

Here's another suggestion for anyone starting a venture and/or seeking venture capital. Be careful about using funding agents or "finders" to help you locate and raise venture capital. These people will often make all kinds of promises about who they know, and what they can do for you, but in fact you usually don't need them, and what's more it's better for your professional development as a CEO to do this yourself. My company, Radar Networks, was approached over the years by several finders. We even tried working with a few before we knew better -- but in the end we raised our capital on our own, without their help. And you can too.

The rest of this article discusses this subject in more detail, and provides suggestions for how to structure a deal with a finder if you still want to use one.

On Using Technical Recruiters

This is just a note for other startups who are considering using technical recruiters. Be careful. At Radar Networks, we tried using what appeared to be a reputable technical recruiting firm to fill several positions. Like many tech recruiters, they required an up-front advance against their fees (which would come as a percentage of the first year salaries of anyone we hire through their firm). They then set off looking for people for us to hire. We were seeking top-level Java coders and search engineers.

For our $10,000 up-front retainer fee, we received 12 resumes over 4 months, not one of which fit our needs, and many of which were for people who were not even available. We never made a single offer, let alone hire, through them. When I spoke to the CEO of this firm about the total lack of results we were getting, he claimed they were spending "hundreds of hours" doing searches for us. I find that extremely hard to believe, given the results. Unfortunately, although I complained to them about their performance or lack thereof several times, they did not remedy the problem. I also asked for a refund, but they refused. So basicaly it cost us just under $1000 a resume. What a total rip off! I won't mention the name of the recruiting firm, but they are based in the Bay Area and I would definitely not recommend working with them.

In any case, we ended up hiring all our people through our own network, and through Craigslist and other job boards, at a much lower cost and in less time. I would not use a technical recruiter again after this experience. I do think that recruiters may be useful for VP and higher-level positions, or perhaps outside of the tech field for other kinds of people. And maybe there are tech recruiting firms out there that are really good. But frankly I am skeptical given this recent experience.

Lew Tucker -- Java Pioneer and Creator of Salesforce.com's AppExchange to be CTO of Radar Networks

NEWS RELEASE

Radar Networks appoints Lew Tucker Ph.D. as Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — Aug. 28, 2006 — Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com) today announced the appointment of Lew Tucker, Ph.D. as its Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer. Radar Networks is building technology for enriching content that will catalyze the evolution of a new dimension of the Web. This new dimension is the next frontier in search, advertising, content distribution and commerce. The company is presently in stealth-mode and anticipates releasing its first commercial products in 2007.

Mr. Tucker will be responsible for leading technology development for the company’s core platform and online services applications.

Mr. Tucker brings an impressive portfolio of technology achievements to his new role as VP and CTO of Radar Networks. Prior to joining Radar Networks, he was Vice-President of AppExchange at Salesforce.com where he drove the growth of the AppExchange online marketplace.  AppExchange is widely regarded as a successful and transformational strategic initiative at Salesforce.com, moving the company’s product offerings from applications to a broader platform.

Prior to his role at Salesforce.com, Mr. Tucker was Vice-President of Internet Services at Sun Microsystems where he was a core member of the first Javasoft executive team and an early evangelist for the advancement of the Java technology platform. He later moved to have overall corporate responsibility for Sun’s presence on the World Wide Web.

Mr. Tucker holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has authored numerous papers on computer architecture, AI, and machine vision. Earlier in his career, he was Director of Research at Thinking Machines, Inc., and contributed to the development of the massively parallel Connection Machine supercomputer.

“Our team is really honored that Lew has chosen to join Radar Networks,” said Nova Spivack, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Radar Networks, “He has repeatedly demonstrated a unique ability to lead world-class technology teams and achieve widespread adoption of their innovations.”

“Joining Radar Networks was an opportunity I couldn’t resist,” said Mr. Tucker. “I have been looking forward to working in an area that has the potential to change the way in which we use the Web today. Nova and the team at Radar Networks have achieved something which is both innovative and ready for mainstream use.”

Radar Networks was founded in 2003, by Nova Spivack (http://www.mindingtheplanet.net), a long-time technology visionary who co-founded EarthWeb and helped bring it through an historic IPO during the first Web revolution. The company has spent several years working quietly on a new core technology for the next-generation of the Web. The Company is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Leapfrog Ventures. Headquartered in San Francisco.

Great News for Radar Networks

I'm very pleased to announce that two distinguished Silicon Valley veterans, Lew Tucker Ph.D. and Mike Clary, have joined Radar Networks (http://www.radarnetworks.com).

In addition, we have just launched a new version of the Radar Networks corporate website with these details and more. It's been a great few weeks at Radar: As well as Lew and Mike, we've made a number of great new hires at other levels of the company, including several new senior engineers, a search architect, an additional UI designer, and our first office manager. On top of that we've come up with several very interesting new algorithms related to what we are doing over the last few weeks and our alpha is making solid progress. We're now around 15 people and growing and it really feels like the company has shifted into a new stage of growth. And we're having a lot of fun!

Sexy Photos of Libraries?

Well if you are into libraries I guess these photos are sexy. Personally I've always loved libraries and used to spend hours just exploring in my college library. The Web is similarly fascinating to wander in, but there's still something special about physical, tangible books that's missing from the digital revolution. Is it just me or is it getting kind of warm in here?

New Discovery: Enzymes Capable of Quantum Tunneling

Drug discovery meets quantum mechanics in this article about recent evidence for quantum tunneling in enzymes:

SYDNEY, 25 August 2006: British scientists have found that enzymes cheat time and space by quantum tunnelling - a much faster way of travelling than the classical way - but whether or not perplexing quantum theories can be applied to the biological world is still hotly debated.

Until now, no one knew just how the enzymes speed up the reactions, which in some cases are up to a staggering million times faster.

You've Heard about Global Warming ... Now Comes "Global Cooling"

Russian scientists are now predicting a period of "Global Cooling" will begin in 2012. Well at least the good news is that Al Gore can make a sequel. And I guess this means San Francisco will have even colder summers...er winters...now? But all jokes aside, this is something to track. The term "global warming" is  misleading. In fact a better term would just be "global climate change." An increase in temperature does not mean that all parts of the world will get warmer -- it will actually result in a precipitous decrease in temperature in some places as the Gulf Stream currents change and global air currents also shift. While everyone else is getting their sun-tan lotion ready, perhaps those in the know should be buying down jackets?

I'm Going to Start Blogging About Radar Networks Here

I haven't blogged very much about my stealth startup, Radar Networks, yet. At the most, I've made a few cryptic posts and announcements in the past, but we've been keeping things pretty quiet. That's been a conscious  decision because we have been working intensively on R&D  and we just weren't ready to say much yet.

Unlike some companies which have done massive and deliberate hype about unreleased vapor software, we really felt it would be better to just focus on our work and let it speak for itself when we release it.

The fact is we have been working quietly for several years on something really big, and really hard. It hasn't always been easy -- there have been some  technical challenges that took a long time to overcome. And it took us a long time to find VC's daring enough to back us.

The thing is, what we are making is not a typical Web 2.0 "build it and flip it in 6 months" kind of project. It's deep technology that has long-term infrastructure-level implications for the Web and the future of content. And until recently we really didn't even have a good way to describe it to non-techies. So we just focused on our work and figured we would talk about it someday in the future.

But perhaps I've erred on the side of caution -- being so averse to gratuitous hype that I have literally said almost nothing publicly about the company. We didn't even issue a press release about our Series A round (which happened last April -- I'll be adding one to our new corporate site, which launches on Sunday night however, for historical purposes), and until today, our site at Radar has been  just a one-page placeholder with no info at all about what we are doing.

But something happened that changed my mind about this recently. I had lunch with my friend Munjal Shah, the CEO of Riya. Listening to Munjal tell his stories about how he has blogged so openly about Riya's growth, even from way before their launch, and how that has provided him and his team with amazingly valuable community feedback, support, critiques, and new ideas, really got me thinking. Maybe it's time Radar Networks started telling a little more of its story? It seems like the team at Riya really benefitted from being so open. So although, we're still in stealth-mode and there are limits to what we can say at this point, I do think there are some aspects we can start to talk about, even before we've launched. And besides that our story itself is interesting -- it's the story of what it's like to build and work in a deep-technology play in today's venture economy.

So that's what I'm going to start doing here -- I'm going to start telling our story on this blog, Minding the Planet. I already have around 500 regular readers, and most of them are scientists and hard-core techies and entrepreneurs. I've been writing mainly about emerging technologies that are interesting enough to inspire me to post about them, and once in a while about ideas I have been thinking about. These are also subjects that are of interest to the people who read this blog. But now I'm also going to start blogging more about Radar Networks and what we are doing and how it's going. I'll post about our progress, the questions we have, the achievements on our team, and of course news about our launch plans. And I hope to hear from people out there who are interested in joining us when we do our private invite-only beta tests.

We're still quite a ways from a public launch, but we do have something working in the lab and it's very exciting. Our VC's want us to launch it now, but it's still an early alpha and we think it needs a lot more work (and testing) before our baby is ready to step out into the big world out there. But it looks promising. I do think, all modesty aside for a moment, that it has the potential to really advance the Web on a broad scale. And it's exciting to work on.

This post is already long enough, so I'll finish here for the moment. In my upcoming posts I will start to talk a little bit more about the new category that Radar Networks is going to define, and some of the technologies we're using, and challenges we've overcome along the way. And I'll share some insights, and stories, and successes we've had.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and besides that, my dinner's ready. More later.

Radar Networks News...Coming Soon

My company, Radar Networks, will be announcing some news next week. Stay tuned. We'll be issuing some press releases along with several new sections on our Website, and more clues about what we are building...

Scientist Raises Possibility of Silicon-Based Life

Just read an interesting article on the possibility of "intraterrestrial" silicon-based life on Earth:

SETI spends enormous amounts of money and resources looking for life outside of Earth's realm, but life forms so alien that scientists may simply not have recognized evidence of their existence could inhabit the Earth, according to a leading scientist.

Dr Tom Gold, emeritus professor of astronomy at Cornell University in America, believes that organisms based on silicon - completely unrelated to all the carbon-based life man has encountered so far - may live at great depths.

In a forthcoming book he will suggest that scientists should take the possibility more seriously. Gold, who is a member of the Royal Society, previously predicted that vast amounts of more conventional bacteria live miles down within the Earth's crust. Scientists initially dismissed the idea, but many now agree with him.

"So long as nobody suspects there could be silicon-based life, we may just not be clever enough to identify it," he said last week.

Rocks bearing signs of silicon-based organisms may already be sitting in laboratories, he believes, with their significance overlooked.

Every known living organism, from bacteria to mankind, is based on the chemistry of carbon, which forms the complex molecules such as DNA that are central to our existence. Scientists believe that if extraterrestrial life is found, the chances are that it, too, will be carbon-based.

Editor's Note: While the prospect of silicon-based life is an interesting subject for further research, what the above scientists failed to note is that there is already a large population of Silicone-based life, particularly in Hollywood. Of course they probably can't get government funding to research THAT subject!                                                                                                                                                   

Study: Blackberry Addiction Similar to Drugs

Blackberry email devices can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users, experts warned today.

They said the palmtop gadgets, which have been nicknamed 'crackberries' because users quickly become hooked on them, could be seriously damaging to mental health.

 

The study, carried out by New Jersey's Rutgers University School, claims the Blackberry is fuelling a rise in email and internet addiction, with sufferers able to survive only a few minutes without checking for new mail.

One key sign of a user being addicted is if they focus on their Blackberry ignoring those around them

Good Article on Loop Quantum Gravity -- New Approach to Physics

The New Scientist published a nice overview of the emerging theory of Loop Quantum Gravity. I've been following this for a number of years, ever since my friend Bram turned me onto it. It's related in some ways to other models of discrete space-time, such as cellular automata and digital physics.

LEE SMOLIN is no magician. Yet he and his colleagues have pulled off one of the greatest tricks imaginable. Starting from nothing more than Einstein's general theory of relativity, they have conjured up the universe. Everything from the fabric of space to the matter that makes up wands and rabbits emerges as if out of an empty hat.

It is an impressive feat. Not only does it tell us about the origins of space and matter, it might help us understand where the laws of the universe come from. Not surprisingly, Smolin, who is a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, is very excited. "I've been jumping up and down about these ideas," he says.

This promising approach to understanding the cosmos is based on a collection of theories called loop quantum gravity, an attempt to merge general relativity and quantum mechanics into a single consistent theory.

The origins of loop quantum gravity can be traced back to the 1980s, when Abhay Ashtekar, now at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, rewrote Einstein's equations of general relativity in a quantum framework. Smolin and Carlo Rovelli of the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France, later developed Ashtekar's ideas and discovered that in the new framework, space is not smooth and continuous but instead comprises indivisible chunks just 10^-35 metres in diameter. Loop quantum gravity then defines space-time as a network of abstract links that connect these volumes of space, rather like nodes linked on an airline route map.

From the start, physicists noticed that these links could wrap around one another to form braid-like structures. Curious as these braids were, however, no one understood their meaning. "We knew about braiding in 1987," says Smolin, "but we didn't know if it corresponded to anything physical."  Read More

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

US Rice Supplies Inadvertently Contaminated

It has just come out that supplies of rice in the USA have been contaminated with a gene that was not approved for human consumption. 

Neurons and Universes

This is a cool pair of images showing a striking similarity between the structure of neurons and that of our universe. I've often wondered whether the entire universe isn't some kind of a mind or a brain in which we are like subatomic particles.

A Problem with Space Travel

As the distance a spaceship travels through space increases, so do the odds that it will collide with debris in its path – such as interstellar dust, micrometeorites, asteroids, dark matter, dark stars, etc.

If you are traveling at super high-speed, through uncharted territory, there is no way to know what is out there.

Even if it is charted territory, debris is always flying through – sometimes at incredibly high speeds. Especially when you near solar systems, or in denser areas.

It should be possible to say that after a certain distance the odds are 100% that a spaceship will experience a fatal collision.

As a result, only short range space travel is probably safe enough to be feasible unless some kind of shield technology is invented that can withstand the  blasts that result from collisions with even tiny things at such high speeds.

My guess is that if advanced interstellar civilizations exist, they do not travel linearly through space because it is just too dangerous. They must have a way to "tunnel" – either by using or creating wormholes, or some other means of teleportation, or hyperdimensional travel.

In speaking about this, my friend Josh, suggested the following:

Yeah- and here's another aspect to that problem.

Assume you are using a near light speed drive to go from star to star.

Any detection system you are using (radar, etc) will only extend slightly in front of the ship- because it is only moving slightly faster than you are- and the faster you go, the less time you have to detect and deal with obstacles or objects.

If you are moving slowly- perhaps a generation ship or a "frozen cargo" scenario- you could use radar connected to an autopilot- but you still need something to protect you from micrometeorites and interstellar dust- maybe a big electrostatic shield extending far in front of the ship that will attract and deflect such objects (most meteroids are ferromagnetic, so they respond well to electromagnetic fields...)

You really need a rapid response detection system...

Privacy and Search

The recent negative hype about the lack of privacy in search results got me thinking about the needs of online services versus those of individuals. Is there a way to satisfy both constraints?

AOL's accidental data release was one thing that worried me. Google's "personal search" feature, where the log of all your searches is displayed, was another. The fact that everything you search for and click on, during your entire life, could potentially be logged, owned, accessed, and shared, by and with parties other than yourself, without your consent or even your knowledge, is a step towards a world I wouldn't want to live in.

The arguments in favor of allowing this to continue either hinge on commercial needs or homeland security and law enforcement. Regarding commercial needs: just as in other situations where commercial needs pose risks to individual privacy (such as medical records for example), the government needs to step in and regulate if the industry can't do an adequate job of self-regulating. And regarding industry self-regulation, it can easily become a case of wolves guarding sheep, and so has to be carefully regulated by government on a meta-level. As for the needs of homeland security and law enforcement, access should be strictly regulated (and in theory, it already is). 

The thing is, even if governments and industry stepped up and took responsibility for regulating this situation, one can never be sure that future regime change, accidents, or individuals or groups with both access and a motive won't lead to future privacy violations. As a result even ironclad assurances, laws, and strict procedures by organizations and governments, won't protect anyone against such unknowns. The only truly safe solution is one that puts all of the control, and all of the responsibility and liability, for one's own private data, in one's own hands. In a digital world, where everything is potentially recorded and logged forever, this is really important.

The solution is, I think, that individuals, rather than search companies, should own and control their searchstreams and their clickstreams such that they can make use of that information for their own personalization needs, and they can selectively (and either authentically or anonymously) share it with other services if and when they want to. Someone should build an infrastructure that enables this and then make it an API that all services and apps can use. The folks at Attention Trust and Root Markets are on the right track. This is a very interesting business opportunity.

I would like to see a search engine and a search toolboar for Firefox that enable you to search anonymously. I did a little research (on Google, how ironic) and found Proxify, Kaxy and Mezzy. They seem interesting although perhaps a little clunky seeming. What we need is a high-profile, really polished, professional, well-funded, simple anonymous proxy for Google. And a Firefox toolbar to go with it.

If a service like what I am describing existed (and there was some level of independent audit that could assure me that it really didn't capture or save anything private without my permission -- for example if all the code was open source and vetted), then I would definitely always use it instead of going directly to Google. Does it exist already? Let me know. If not, someone should build it. In fact, I wouldn't mind if it showed me ads, just like Google does. So it could make money from my searching. I would bring my business there as would most people who have educated themselves about this issue.

Finally, wearing my corporate hat for the moment, as someeone building an online service in the search space, if there was a suitable (and that is the key term here...) way that the service my company is building could give individuals control of their private data while also still being able to learn from it in aggregate and/or anonymously for individuals, that would be great. As an online service provider I don't really want to have to worry about keeping such private information and all the overhead and potential liability that goes with it.

Online services do need to learn from the behavior of their users in order to personalize content and target ads, etc. But they don't need to necessarily house that data themselves, nor do they need to necessarily be able to key it to the real identities of their users. If there was an infrastructure that enabled my service to learn, personalize and target, without having to hold and manage the dataset underlying that capability, that would actually be a potential savings to my business, and a reduction of risk, and a benefit to my users. The thing is, while early attempts to enable this do exist, they aren't mature enough to rely on, and nobody knows how well they will scale or whether they will have enough funding and traction to last. So in the meantime those of us building online services are in a gray area -- we need certain features for our services to function well, and we also would like to find a way to protect privacy for the individual. This is the connundrum of the moment. It's a business opportunity for someone out there.

What is in frame 2:19, Anyone?

Can anyone figure out what is in frame 2:19 of this old Apollo program video. Is it a flagpole? Well, it seems quite far away to be a flagpole. And if it's that far away it would also be really really big. So I'm guessing it ain't a flagpole. A giant chimney? Doubtful considering it's the moon. Ok then, what is it?

Help Me Find Good Desktop Search

Hi everyone. I have been having a hard time finding a good desktop search tool. Do you have any suggestions? So far I've tried several, but none have done the trick -- here are the pros and cons:

• Yahoo Desktop Search: This is basically just a version of X1 that Yahoo has bundled. I had an older version and it worked fine. Then I made the mistake of upgrading to a newer version and it doesn't work anymore. I use MS Outlook on XP (yes, I know, I know -- time to switch to a Mac!). Yahoo Desktop Search (when it was working) was the best I've used mainly because it was lightning fast and immediately stopped indexing when I used the computer -- with no appreciable delays. No other tool I have tried was as polite in letting go of system resources. Unfortunately there is little to no technical support on Yahoo for this product.
• X1 Enterprise Desktop Client: This application crashes my Outlook every time I install it. As far as I can tell there is not much support for it at X1's site. They want people to pay for premium support, but why should I pay for that if I can't even get the app to run without crashing my Outlook? There was no information on thier support site to explain the particular problems I found with their app.
• Google Desktop Search: This app has several weaknesses. The most annoying issue with this product is that it is constantly indexing and is a massive processor hog. While indexing, it does not let go of system resources fast enough (ie. immediately) when there is user activity (such as typing), causing delays or slowdowns before the computer is fully available. Google does not provide an advanced setting to control indexing politeness, unlike all the other products. Another weakness is the lack of a preview pane in the results -- it just shows a brief blurb, but that is not useful for example when searching emails.
• Copernic Desktop Search: This app wasn't bad, but lacked a toolbar to integrate directly into the Outlook interface. It also seemed a lot slower to find results than the other apps -- getting search results usually required a delay of up to a few seconds. On the indexing side it also did not pause indexing as quickly as Yahoo Desktop Search (which was the fastest I've tried so far).
• Microsoft's Built In Desktop Search in MS Outlook. Oh please. Don't even get me started. Not useable at all. Whoever wrote it should be ashamed.

And we have a winner....!

• MSN Desktop Search: Thanks to a suggestion from Shashi, I am now trying out this app. So far so good. This may be the solution I am looking for. Too early to tell. I will update this with info once I have some time to test it. Thanks Shashi! Yes, folks MSN Desktop Search is flawless so far. It's the only desktop search for Windows XP that I've tested that meets my stringent requirements for speed, politness, functionality, and stability.

If you have other suggestions or ideas, please add comments to this post -- Thanks.

The Time Fountain

This is a really cool art and technology project that creates an interactive timekeeping system out of a fountain of falling drops of water and a strobe light. You can interact with the drops. It has to be seen to be explained. Watch the video.

What is Radar Networks up to?

Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel's perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning. So what are the 15 people at Radar Networks working on? It's still a secret, but yes, it's related to the Semantic Web, and yes, Shel has hinted on his blog at some of it. But it's probably not what you think. And, no, it's not semantic video blogging either. More hints later on. For now, if you are a blogger and you have a wish-list for what wikis or blogs could do next, feel free to submit your list in the comments on this post: I'm doing some informal market research...

[Corrected due to typo.]

Physicists Plan to Create New Universe in Lab

Ok, this will be pretty interesting... as long as nothing unexpected happens, like for example, our universe starting to drain out through the wormhole they are making...that would suck...

PHYSICISTS IN JAPAN PLAN TO CREATE NEW UNIVERSE IN LAB
 USING THE HIGGS FIELD, SCIENTISTS THEORIZE IT IS POSSIBLE TO CAUSE A 'BABY UNIVERSE' TO BREAK OFF FROM OUR OWN, SAFELY
2 August 2006

A radical new project could permit human beings to create a "baby universe" in a laboratory in Japan. While it sounds like a dangerous undertaking, the physicists involved believe that if the project is successful, the space-time around a tiny point within our universe will be distorted in such a way that it will begin to form a new superfluid space, and eventually break off, separate in all respects from our experience of space and time, causing no harm to the fabric of our universe.

The project takes as its starting point two basic theories about the foundations of our universe: the big bang and inflation theory. The big bang theory, as many readers are well aware, observes that all objects in the known universe appear to be moving away from one another, suggesting that the universe was jump-started when all matter and energy were concentrated in an inconceivably tiny space, allowing them to overcome binding forces and causing a cosmic explosion.

It is well-tested and consistent with all currently accepted models for general cosmology, as tested against advanced theoretical and observational physics. But it is only one piece of the puzzle. Inflation is a key theory, developed in 1981, when MIT physicist Alan Guth observed that there appeared to have been a period immediately following the big bang when the universe "inflated" rapidly, allowing distinct regions of matter and energy to function comfortably free from any forces that might cause them to collapse against each other or disrupt each other's evolution.

This project is not exactly theoretical physics at work. It is closer to a physical application of observed phenomena, in combination, with the aim of achieving an as yet untested physical effect. Inflation theory helps provide the means of understanding how that effect might be brought about.

As reported by the New Scientist: "Inflation theory, subsequently modified by Linde, relies on the fact that the 'vacuum' of empty space-time is not a boring, static place. Instead, it is subject to quantum fluctuations that cause strange bubbles to appear at random times. These bubbles of 'false vacuum' contain space-time with different —and very curious— properties."

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