Audience member: It's a common assumption of the ANX that SSL was sufficient for encryption over that network. Is that your opinion as well?

Audience member: Could you repeat the question?

Audience member: The ANX (unclear) to decide that SSL was sufficient for encryption, which is also being used by Dell and other online (unclear) systems, and I'm just curious if, technically speaking, he considers it to be sufficient.

Vinton Cerf: Actually, I had trouble hearing all of that question, I'm sorry. You repeated it twice for everyone else, and here we are, and I'm half deaf, and that's a problem. May I make a suggestion? We may wind up needing to play the Geraldo game here, which means running around in the audience.

Philip Power: I'll run around.

Vinton Cerf: You run around the audience and stick this in front of them, and that will help.

Philip Power: Why don't I run around? Here, Jacque will run around, better yet.

Audience member: The question is simply, is SSL encryption, in your opinion, your expert opinion, sufficient to promulgate worldwide electronic commerce as the people at Chrysler, GM and Ford seem to be of the opinion, and Northwest and Dell and other folks, in their purchasing transactions, or the transactions on ANX.

(Some bustle as the microphone is brought back to the stage. Audience member: "Let's hear it for technology!")

Vinton Cerf: We're sorry; the answer is encrypted. OK, actually, first of all it is fair to observe that not every transaction needs to be protected to the same degree, so it's possible that more than one kind or more than one level of encryption will be suitable to protect various exchanges.

But what is absolutely critical is that there be standards, not too many of them, that can be implemented so that if you are engaged in any transaction, regardless of which one and which level of encryption it is, your system, your unit, can actually participate in it. The problem that you have is that you have a single device and a collection of software that may be confronted with a series of different interactions with different parties. That system has got to be able to adapt to whatever encryption capability is required.

My sense right now is that the fewer standards we have, the better, because it's easier to achieve uniformity, which is why, in the Internet today, we generally try to settle on a single technology or a single standard, in order to achieve most of the results. The implication of that is that if we were going to have high-quality encryption for much of the transactions, then we ought to be able to apply that to all of them.

Personally, I wouldn't mind having my private exchanges protected to the same degree that a corporate interchange might require, so my belief at this point is that the highest grade that we can reasonably argue for is what we should be shooting for.

Audience member: My question is addressed to Dr. Finholt and Professor Jahanian and perhaps ultimately to Dr. Griffiths. It has to do with the paradigm shift represented in what you call the collaboratory. And the question really is one of credit and incentives. If the experiment is distributed, who gets to claim the credit? I think that's an issue for certainly the academic practice of science at this point. Nuclear physicists have been reasonably good at this for a little while, and one sees, in fact, articles in journals where the first page is occupied solely by the names of the collaborators in the experiment.

But I would say that's not true in fact of many other fields, and it seems to me what you are doing is making something possible that wasn't possible before, and I think we have to deal with the consequences.

Daniel Atkins: Tom, you want to handle that? And also perhaps Tim Killeen, who is a space scientist, might want to speak to it.

Tom Finholt: Well, it's a very interesting question and speaks clearly to another kind of paradigm shift.

I think one of the things that's distinctive about the space science community is that they had a history of collaboration coming into this project. So in some sense, we sort of seeded the territory a little bit in this specific case. More generally what you see, as collaboratories come into being, are efforts to renegotiate rules of the road, and let me give you an illustration.

There's a consortium of brain scientists called the Nancy Pritzker Depression Research Network that consists of brain scientists at Stanford, at the Mental Health Research Institute here at Michigan and at the Cornell Medical Center. They've been given money by the Pritzker Foundation on the express condition that they spend it together. They can't just take the money and divvy it up into thirds and, you know, be on with it. They have to do projects that are unified. That particular stipulation by Jay Pritzker has driven them to think about how they might collaborate. Technology is one way they realize that collaboration.

In parallel with the introduction of enabling technology, their eyes open to new ways of working together. These new ways force a re-examination of old ways such that within the Pritzker Network, the participating scientists sat down and re-negotiated the rules of the road, in the form of a research "covenant," to reflect the new collaborative possibilities and challenges (and threats) made possible by information technology.

Now we do a lot of work within much more competitive fields, like HIV/AIDS research (in the form of the Great Lakes Center for AIDS Research, the first virtual Center for AIDS Research funded by the National Institutes of Health). I'm not at all optimistic that people who are struggling for the Nobel Prize are somehow going to subordinate themselves to others (particularly competitors) or that they will conduct their experiments in such an open and public fashion, but even in the HIV/AIDS community I think we can point to profound changes in orientation toward information sharing and collaboration - in many cases tied to changes in information technology. Tim, did you want to comment, just briefly?

Tim Killeen: Just a quick comment. It took the meteorology community 30 years to develop a predictive capability that could lead to TV weather forecasting at about 80 percent predictability. The space physics community wants to do the same job with a much more complicated system, including not just neutral air motions, but plasmas, photochemistry, particle physics and incredibly complicated topology of the near Earth space environment in two years, at a time when our commercial investment in space is going up a factor of five.
As Tom said, there's nearly a trillion dollars invested in satellites. Astronauts, preparing the space station, going on EVA, are exposed to penetrating radiation. So I think what's happening really is that we're being compelled to move in this direction. It's not a question of whether it's comfortable or useful or credit is apportioned in a reasonable way. There's no other way of doing this particular task. And using the entire inventory of funded observatories, globally distributed, as a single, integrated observatory, connecting that in with supercomputer class models and satellites become such a powerful way of doing business that there's no going back.

Audience member: You've spoken and demonstrated with a great deal of eloquence the transformation that technology will have on education, on business practices. I haven't heard much said about how it will change our sense of the body politic. Do you anticipate that there will be a major change in the way we see our democracy operating, as influenced by technology?

Doug Van Houweling: I'll take a brief stab at that. The real question that we have to ask ourselves with regard to politics is whether improved access and more rapid response to public opinion will generate progress or not.

There's a real debate going on today in the world about whether political systems that are representational and that the representatives take a strong trusteeship role with regard to their responsibilities are better than direct democracies with rapid transaction times and the ability for information and models to generate quick response to important public issues.

My own view is that those issues are going to be sorted out in the real world over the next decade or so. And it's going to present an enormous challenge, especially in a period where we've already decided that expertise is not highly valued in our public representatives, because we've decided that we won't let them stay in office for more than a few years at a time. It's going to be a very interesting period. I'm sorry I can't answer your question. I'd be happy to have any of my colleagues add to my comments.

Vinton Cerf: I have one reaction. In some physical systems, it's considered a mistake to react too quickly. You introduce into the system what's called hysteresis to not react quite so quickly, otherwise you wind up doing what's called tracking noise. That's why sometimes it's not a good thing to watch the ticker tape in the stock market.

In a university system, for example, it's often thought to be a good thing that it takes a while for the academic to agree on changes to the curriculum, so that the student who's trapped in the system for four years doesn't find himself ricocheting around in a rapidly changing set of requirements.

So the fact of the matter is, sometimes introducing delay deliberately is a good thing. Maybe we should think before we act. So I would argue that even if the system permits the kind of rapid response that we can potentially get, we need to use that rapid response wisely and maybe store away the results and let them gestate for a while before we actually act on them.

José-Marie Griffiths: While you're chasing the next question, perhaps I could add that the huge volumes of indiscriminate information that are available at the touch of a button also need to be sifted through, and we need to give people the skills to think about what it is they're looking for and to make judgments about the information they receive from different sources. So that adds another piece of delay into the system.

Audience member: With the drive to digital publishing and digital libraries, how soon are we going to realize the benefits of this sort of publishing by the elimination or the downsizing of physical plants of libraries, the elimination of print newspapers, periodicals and especially, like in community libraries, they've got racks and racks of reference books that get rotated every year for a new volume of virtually the same book. When are those things just going to disappear so that a library instead of doubling its size can reduce down to maybe a quarter of what it is now and people access it over the Net?

Daniel Atkins: Let me make three comments in response to that. The first is that the native, original form of most anything you see on paper now is digital, so that paper is now being used as one of several alternate distribution mechanisms. So I think part of the question of how long paper will continue is an economic and user preference issue about information distribution.

The second - let me speak to that. How long? It will depend on the genre. It's not a books versus bits argument. It's that some forms - and you mentioned one, reference material -are very rapidly and appropriately moving to online and searchable versions. Journals are rapidly becoming digital and online, but when the heads of libraries will have the nerve to take their print-on-paper back issues off of the shelves, I can't predict.

But other genres, the novel for example, I think will be in print-on-paper form for a very, very long time, and then of course as I said earlier there are new genres emerging, their impact yet to be discovered, that only exist in a digital form.

The boldest experiment in trying to create incentive for libraries to remove physical paper is the JSTOR project that Wendy Lougee mentioned. The Mellon Foundation, as an alternative to responding to more and more libraries asking for bricks and mortar to expand their physical walls, decided to make a major investment in creating a high-quality, universally accessible archive of the complete runs of what will potentially be 100 to 150 of the core academic journals. When that becomes reliable enough, and it's quickly approaching that, and complete enough, we expect within the next few years that some of the libraries will be starting to move journals to very, very secondary physical storage.

Vinton Cerf: I'm going to actually debate that a little bit with Dan. There are two reasons.

First of all, the longevity of some of these digital media are still open to question. I can remember going in to show some librarians this spiffy new CD-ROM, right? And the librarian disappeared and came back with a manuscript from 1000 A.D. It was a beautiful piece of vellum, with lovely writing, illustrated manuscript. She said, "Now tell me again about the longevity of this CD-ROM."

Anyone who has had the experience of material recorded on 8-inch floppies, trying to figure out, I've still got the floppy, I don't know if the bits are there, but I can't find a machine that will read it. Or the guys at NASA with their hundreds of thousands of tapes. They tell me, some of them, if you put them in the machine, all the bits will disappear on the first read, because the tape will lose all of its ferro-magnetic material.

We better be a little cautious about how quickly we discard the technologies that have served well. What I'd argue is that new technologies are kind of like water poured over a really bumpy landscape. What happens is that the water fills up the places where there isn't anything. So these new technologies find a niche where they're the most valuable. And I would argue that we will find that we are augmenting, not necessarily replacing, but augmenting some of our storage media by using the new technology, but not necessarily completely replacing them. This isn't just because I'm a bibliophile. It's because I really worry about the longevity of some of this stuff.

If you've ever been out on the Web and found some information that was really valuable to you and then tried to find it again, you've discovered that sometimes it isn't there anymore. That kind of medium is not going to do it for people who need archival data.

Daniel Atkins: Since we're debating, a rebuttal. First let me quickly agree that the greatest issue and the most understudied issue confronting us is the long-term access to digital information. So I agree with you fully on that. We also are not advocating that all paper be destroyed. We are saying that there will be user preferences that will lead some genres at different rates than the others.

On the question of long-term preservation, it's true that media, the magnetic media, has a rather short life compared to microfilm or vellum, but we also have the potential of regenerating full fidelity, migrating the digital objects to new media that we don't have in the old world. So I think strategies of not simply media preservation but migration are going to be the solution to that problem.

Philip Power: It is now 6:38. I promised you 6:30. One last question. Quick!

Audience member: Yes sir. This is in the nature of a comment to the gentleman's question about what's going to happen politically. I've just come in from Washington, and in the real world we are now confronting a decision that has been taken completely out of the president's hands by a statute that was passed with the help of a, shall we say, quick reaction process with the aid of information. And that is, with the new explosions in now Pakistan and, a couple of weeks ago, India, there will and now are sanctions against both countries that cannot be removed by the president. They have to be removed by the Congress, which means the system is completely frozen, and that was probably driven by a process that was not thought through.

Philip Power: Thank you.

First, thank you very much for participating in the opening maneuvers of this symposium. Dinner for the Marshall Scholars is tonight at seven in the trattoria Bella Ciao, that's C-I-A-O, in Ann Arbor. We resume tomorrow morning at 8:30 sharp with Professor Roger Needham giving the address. We will proceed through the day and I will promise to keep us on a better schedule than I was successful in doing tonight. Thank you very much.