25 December 2010

New Year's Resolutions - 2011

0. Write the Leading Edge Report I described in my 2008 LEF Grant proposal.
1. Write the Metaverse for National Intelligence paper for the DNI/CIO
2. Request a X3D version every good and service I purchase in CY2011.
3. Write the EmployeeGraph Concept paper I discuss on CSC's C3 site.
4. Author three X3D scenes using all the nodes in H-Animation and ... specifications
5. Author three H3D scenes using all the API elements
6. Author three OpenAL scenes using all the API elements
7. Submit a feature paper for a Virtual Reality publication that's peer reviewed
8. Specify the LifeGraph requirements
9. Analyze the gaps between the LifeGraph specification and COTS products

18 October 2010

More of the same with LifeGraphs

I completed Air War College, 17th Edition this month! I'm pursuing my ITIL Expert certification now and have two classes behind me. My near term goal is a paper for the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town, South Africa next October. I have six months to write what I think will be the only paper on the general solution to spanning user-defined, hollow spheroids with an arbitrary number of points that are isogonal and equidistant. The purpose of the paper is to use the solution to the spanning problem as the objective function for a constellation of satellites equal in number to the points chosen for a spanned hollow spheroid that are unperturbed by J2, the Moon, etc. The constellation problem is to size, orient and phase the satellites to best match the singular solution. This is not a trivial problem for arbitrary N Earth orbiting satellites.

The motivation for this research is based on the idea of an Earth Outer Space Traffic Control System that has a transparent infrastructure being this isogonal and equidistant constellation, which is supplemented with platforms (orbiting and based elsewhere) carrying sensors for telecommunications, navigation and surveillance like the core constellation. The heavy-traffic orbital regimes, which will vary over a day to a solar cycle (11 years) will dictate where the EOSTCS needs to be augmented.

Suffice it to say, I hope to use X3D to render the spanning volume results and the inter-satellite parameters of the candidate constellations that seek to match the isogonal and equidistant (wrt to nearest neighbors) spanned volume.

10 August 2010

Unsatisfactory Blue Dart

I worried my Blue Dart was too "out there" for Joint Strategic Leadership when it took more than a day to get a response. Here's what my instructor had to say about it.

William, Unfortunately, your Blue Dart on "Lifegraphs" has been graded unsatisfactory. I read it through twice and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I had never even heard of this topic until your Blue Dart. I took it to our IT folks and this was unfamiliar to them too. Keep in mind that Gen Lorenz wanted Blue Darts that could possibly be published in your hometown newspaper. Keep your audience in mind. Don't pick a subject that is so esoteric that people are unfamiliar with it. You write well. If you pick a topic that is more understandable, you should be able to sail right through this. Best of luck.

I will write my next Blue Dart this week on a strategy for cross domain solutions to help win the GWOT.

02 August 2010

My Blue Dart for AWC - LifeGraphs for National Security and Defense

A Blue Dart is like an op/ed piece in length, purpose and style. I had to write one for the AWC 17th edition Joint Strategic Leadership course. I will submit my Blue Dart after my mentor gives me the OK. If my JSL instructor accepts it, I will proceed with submitting a Professional Development Plan. Otherwise, I will have to rewrite my Blue Dart and resubmit it within 30 days.



Please tell me what you think about the 800 words I wrote on LifeGraphs for national security and defense. Condensing LifeGraphs, the concept, into 700 - 800 words is challenging if you know me and all I can say about it.



My 40 years of living have been circumscribed by computing machinery, software suites and databases galore yet no single legal entity can generate a LifeGraph for me or of me. I have digital tracks, electronic signatures and paper marks in every branch of the US government but it probably cannot graph those artifacts into contiguous behavior and identity patterns with the stealth, speed and agility of F-22A Raptors. Sadly, it is mostly true for our enemies—remember 9/11. Is this changing faster and for the better? Our government wrestles with the transformation of managing human identity in cyberspace to govern. No other nation-state has set a transformational example to emulate so we may be the bellwether. Three-hundred million US citizens’ digital identities are the cooperative but constitutionally protected targets to protect and defend from thousands of criminals and enemies of the state. I believe coordinating LifeGraph legislation, information regulation, financial transformation, and biometric integration will catalyze our National Security and Defense improvement.


LifeGraphs catalyze the conversion of data into actionable intelligence because at least one person involved with traded items will cooperate with US protectors and defenders. Their LifeGraph will be the nexus to synthesize the products in contextual scenes of behaviors to support decisions of national security (e.g., adjudicate a security investigation or arrest a terrorist suspect). LifeGraphing remains a labor intensive challenge for our intelligence and law enforcement communities.


A LifeGraph is a legal record of ownership and stewardship for a natural or legal person’s life and/or property. LifeGraph legislation I call the eReceipt law would obligate traders to exchange non-proprietary (royalty-free), digital encodings of tangible goods and observable services’ structure and behavior at or near the point and time of trade. There are few digitally native products of high assemblage with tangible realizations today but most of the millions of globally traded items are not. Repurposing computer-aided (fill in the blank) is occurring to realize new markets for that data in the consumer chain. Owners will choose to encode the usage of the traded item at their discretion using their secure LifeGraph software. The LifeGrapher incentive to encode product usage and human behavior stems from the intrinsic value it accumulates over time. The risk of LifeGraph theft will dissuade many to graph the data no matter the degree or selectivity over a potential 100-year lifetime.


Assume an eReceipt law, the governmental agencies and departments with regulatory powers have to rewrite rules for information exchange between every combination of legal and natural persons. These rules will apply to traded items and human activities subject to taxation. The interfaces between governments, businesses and citizens for property exchange will effectuate LifeGraphs by channeling the virtual products through “semantic engines” with unique identifiers while its tangible instance changes hands as usual. The effect of governmental LifeGraphing on national security and defense is the potential for better administration of its resources and better services to its citizens, who can securely expose their LifeGraphs to attain governmental services more efficiently than today. Citizens pay taxes for services like protection and defense. Regulators should distribute the storage of the virtual Government in proportion with its natural distributions of humans, goods and nature to localize the effects disasters including the costs to militate against them.


A cashless USA is not essential to useful LifeGraphs or argued to enhance national security or defenses but transforming the financial system in this direction could increase the rate of owners encoding their product usage and for natural persons, their behaviors. The more they encode the more valuable their LifeGraph becomes to others—privacy seduces! LifeGraph software will be able to export authentic LifeGraphlets to sale or just give away. A digital cash infrastructure that isolates the government from the exchange between businesses and citizens like paper & coin money is needed—privacy promotes! The premise is you and the enemy will be lured to the infrastructure replacing monetary currency thinking non-attribution is widely available once again. The government has the deepest pockets so the possibility of acquiring LifeGraph content it was never privy to never goes away if they are willing to pay or persuade the LifeGraphers who they allege have it.

Those allegations will be based on the biometric integration of finance and traded items encodings. The capability to sequence the human genome gives security professionals new opportunities to increase the confidence of human identification and authentication in stressing environments when access control to weapons release authority are the kind of decisions being made in the context of national security and defense. Gone are the days of digital key chains for governmental resources protected or defended at home and abroad. Asset protection systems will bind with the human genomes granted access. The national security and defense needs LifeGraph-based information technology and systems to realize higher levels of surety.

26 May 2010

My email to authors of Beyond Total Capture: A Constructive Critique of Lifelogging

10 May 2o10, I wrote the following to Abigail and Steve who wrote a feature article for Communications of the ACM. Neither has replied.

Abigail and Steve,I read your article yesterday with enthusiasm. The article was insightful and thought provoking because I'm eager to go to market with Lifegraphs. LifeGraphs are native XML databases (NXD) initiated by one's parents or guardians at the moment of embryonic discovery (for humans or natural persons) or establishment of legal identity (i.e., governments and corporations--legal persons) and terminated upon their last financial transaction or property disposition at or soon after death or disestablishment.

The mountainous hurdle to effective LifeGraphs is federal legislation to require manufacturers and service providers (i.e., legal persons) to harmoniously repurpose, digitally sign and securely transmit the computer-aided design/drafting files for the goods and services traded with legal and natural persons. To do so is herculean because it means millions of products (i.e., goods and services) like those for the human body, manufactured items and natural elements (e.g., parcels of land, mineral deposits, bodies of water and sectors of air--airspace).

The premise is very soon every good and service in the North American Product Classification System (http://www.census.gov/eos/www/napcs/napcs.htm) will have CAD/D behind it but they all don't get repurposed them for the consumer chain! If you discredit this situation and/or trend then LifeGraphs are a non-starter. If you accept this and think the U.S. Congress will pass an enforceable law for the "21st century e-receipt" then LifeGraph software might form the basis for a Blue Ocean (as in the book Blue Ocean Strategy--www.blueoceanstrategy.com).

Lifegraph software is vaporware today that promises to transform or make irrelevant bookkeepers, accounts, and many trades and professions that have little need for the senses of smell and taste. Those senses are the most difficult to render in an immersive, virtual environment. Using todays' (consumer) technology platforms as a host for the typical 100-yr LifeGraph at its midpoint (of 50 years), an 64GB iPad running LifeGraph software would allow a the 50-yo married Mom to plan, monitor and recall all of her health/medical info via her time-adjusted 3D body scan morphed by her personalized digital human model (PDHM) of all her bodily systems.

Her PDHM is tuned (like a Kalman Filter) with measurements taken by her home health equipment and her healthcare providers, and all inputs are digitally signed and date/time stamped via GPS time receivers on her network.

Say her backyard has a 4-meter wide and 2-meter deep sink hole the morning after torrential rains. She grabs her iPad and calls up the GIS data provided her at the closing by the land parcel seller "by LAW" to see if there has ever been a sinkhole on her property. The search reveals nothing has been recorded by the previous owner or the county. She hires a landscape contractor who uses ground penetrating radar to survey her sinkhole and surrounding land before repairing it. The contractor provides her LifeGraph with the digitally signed GPR data so the subsequent owner will have the subterranean view for a variety of purposes.

If not her body or her natural resources then its a manufactured good like her 2010 Audi Q7 TDI that has its presence in her LifeGraph. In accordance with the federal law, the Audi dealer emailed her a user name and password for her to download theVIN specific auto (assessories and all) she purchased. As she operates and maintains that vehicle that LifeGraph object grows with each good and service for the Q7.

The kewl factor is LifeGraph software providers compete on the presentation layer and cannot lock in customers via proprietary file formats of the primitive data (derived data are another story). I will spare you the dozens of buzzwords identifying the enabling technologies and harmonization of owners and stakeholders.

I am asking for you opinion about the LifeGraph concept. I've blogged about this idea since investigating one particular enabling technology--Extensible 3D Graphics (X3D), VRML's successor in 2007 at http://x3d4enterprise.blogspot.com and http://mobilemirrorworlds.blogspot.com

Thanks for contributing a well-written article to COMMUNICATIONS of the ACM. I can promise you I will reference your article when explaining how LifeGraphs differ from LifeLogs. LifeLog is a concept that has way more press so my listeners are likely to remember and compare it with LifeGraphs.

Regards,--

William O. Glascoe III, PMP
Program Management Consultant
CSC Federal Consulting Practice

Metaverse for National Intelligence and the Enterprises that Acquire it

I've been pondering how to create wholesale demand for the integration of virtual reality technologies into the US Federal Government that address its problems of sustainable efficiency and organizational effectiveness. vGov is the latest government contract vehicle to virtual reality technologies and virtual world integration services in a trusted space. I'm focused on how the Intel Community can use these technologies throughout its enterprise and claim achievement of its 2015 Vision Statement faster because of discipline usage of virtual reality technologies.



When I say the IC, I mean the following in terms of Reserviors, Rates and Ratios (understand I have no access or reason to know the exact figures, especially the energy consumption, but these 10 parameters should appear to be common sense for sizing up an enterprise like the IC in the year 2009):


  • ~30,000,000 computers (= 100/user or 10/sensor or 300/target or...)

  • ~3,000,000 sensors collectors (includes humans)

  • ~300,000 TB data (<10%>
  • ~300,000 users (<1%>
  • ~30,000 installations buildings (service/data centers) platforms (...vehicles, ...)

  • ~30,000 targets targeted daily (humans, nature, and man-made items)

  • ~3,000 apps (operating systems, protocols, RT-embedded, mission-, business-)

  • ~300 GW (average; human calories/staff-hr and power for man-made items)

  • ~300 Billion USD (<3%>
  • ~30 TBps throughput (average: wired and wireless-SATCOM & terrestrial)

A cool graphic integrating this parameters and the values is needed here. I apologize for not having the artist skills to draft one for you.



I have two purposes. First, to integrated virtual reality technologies the IC's capacity to manage its resources--humans, land parcels, and manufactured goods, which include land improvements, fixed & mobile equipment, vehicles, petro/lubricants/oils, other consumables, and monies. Second, to increase the efficiencies of ...operations with the data, information and knowledge the IC creates, calculates, and collects on humans, nature and manufactured items. I don't know of any enterprise-level baselines or benchmarks in this regard so they need to be performed then recognized to continue this quanitative story. Remember to baseline or benchmark is one thing and the baseline or benchmark is another.



(performance posture) Baselines (measurements)



humans - biometrics, psychometrics, personalized digital human models for users and targets

nature - living and non-living things (way too much stuff to even start listing)

manufactured items - parts, ingredients, ... computer-aided designed, engineered and/or manufactured then those files repurposed for end users (what a third of LifeGraphs are about).



(performance posture) Benchmarks (measurements)


humans - qualifications, evaluations, violations, citations (for award or decoration), ...

nature - conservation, perservation, degradation, scaping, forming, ...

manufactured items - toxicity, lethality, efficacy, ...efficiency, warranty, utility, ...

I'll continue this story in earnest after completing Air War College next month. This document needs to become a virtual world in of itself. I will have to overcome my usual paralysis of writing when I get frustrated from a lack of examples to leverage. This happens when I cannot find germane enterprise storylines with quantitative bodies of evidence via the internet.