Highest and best uses of Cyberspace

Two Challenges of New Turf

This column critiques the "new turf" of cyberspace - which, for most of us, is defined by the Internet and especially the World Wide Web. Every new technology or territory challenges a society in at least two distinct ways, which I will call the 1 ) "horseless carriage" and 2) "highest and best" challenges. The first refers to our tendency to see the new only through the lens of preceding experience, such as an automobile in terms of its lack of equine power. In a similar vein, the early white settlers of New England assiduously replicated their previous English lifestyles in a very different cultural and physical terrain. The second challenge, borrowing a phrase from the legalese surrounding zoning decisions, is to make the very most of what you have, tool or territory.

These two challenges are not identical. The difference can be illustrated by using a prediction by RCA mogul David Sarnoff (circa 1939) concerning a then-emerging technology: "It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the nation." Television today has indeed become more than "radio with pictures" meeting Challenge 1- but seems to have fallen well short of Sarnoff's prediction, failing Challenge 2.

APPLICATION TO CYBERSPACE

Cyberspace, as the name implies, is both a technology and a territory. This dual identity places a double burden on us to confront the challenges discussed above. Advocates of cyberspace tout that its grand new virtual vistas will make obsolete the card catalog, the bank teller, and the classroom lecturer. However, most of their discussion focuses on Challenge 1: the new will be radically different from the old. But will we tap its full potential to educate and inform, making highest and best use of the virtual territory known as cyberspace? How can this be done? What are the rules?

To answer these questions, let's visit a few World Wide Web sites that illustrate basic principles of how to use this new technology wisely. (Disclaimer: My choices are extremely subjective, most being related to my data-intensive field of meteorology and my contacts at the University of Wisconsin.)

SOME GARDEN SPOTS ON THE WEB

http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/ index.html

The University of WisconsinMadison's Space Science and Engineering Center, founded by Phi Kappa Phi Scholar Verner Suomi, obtains and archives immense amounts of satellite data every day. But until recently, you needed knowledge of a special computer language and sophisticated electronic connections to see what the Eyes in the Sky see. No more. At this Web site, anyone can find frequently updated images and movie loops of clouds all over the world (from Alaska to Antarctica), maps of ocean temperatures across the globe, and comparisons between satellite observations and the output of a numerical model of the atmosphere created by scientists at Wisconsin. You can even use the high-resolution satellite picture centered on Wisconsin to try to resolve all the Cheeseheads in Green Bay's Lambeau Field!

http://www.library. wisc.edu/ etext/ModelCity/ModelCity.html

Madison, Wisconsin, owes much of its beauty to the visionary design of landscape architect John Nolen, who, in 1911, composed Madison: A Model City as a comprehensive, evolving blueprint for the city's growth. This document is of national and international importance today as the New Urbanist movement attempts to redress the inadequacies of current urban planning by reclaiming the best of early twentieth-century thinking. However, copies of the report are literally falling apart because of age and wear, and are kept under safeguard at the library. In this condition, how can Nolen's plan be made accessible to scholars and professionals, let alone the general public?

Through the efforts of the UWMadison's General Library System Electronic Library program, now everyone can partake of Nolen's vision over the Web. Text and more than 100 illustrations are interwoven as in the original, each scanned-in figure being the best from among the deteriorating library copies. The virtual whole is therefore better than the sum of its physical parts, and a sacred text of New Urbanism is now only a few keystrokes away.

http://http.rap.ucar.edu/ weather/aviation/

Flying the friendly skies soon? Will the ride be a bumpy one? Until recently, you had to ask your pilot for the answer to that question. Now, however, the Web provides up-to-date information on aviation weather hazards such as turbulence and icing.

Greg Thompson at the National Center for Atmospheric Research has created this Web site in such a way that the rampaging river of data from aircraft becomes a color-coded, easily decipherable weather-map-like graphic. You can even specify the region in which you are interested and the type of in-flight weather hazard about which you are worried. It still takes some meteorological knowledge to make complete sense of it all, but Greg's color-coding means that you know not to fly into an ocean of orange or red. For experts, the Web site has hypertext links to innumerable sources of observational and forecast graphics.

http://java.meteor. wisc.edu/ftp/ torngifs/18jul96/report2.html

On July 18 of last year, Wisconsin meteorology Ph.D. student Stephen Jascourt hopped in a car and drove northeast from Madison right into the plot of the movie Twister. He witnessed an "F5" tornado - one of the strongest ever in Wisconsin - as it caused twelve injuries and millions of dollars in damage. In the pre-Web days, Stephen would have collected a few hard-copy maps and some still photos, given a seminar based on his eyewitness account, and then stuffed everything into a desk drawer. Today, you can find his comprehensive description of the storm on the Web. From weather satellite and radar movie loops, to storm-chase anecdotes, to videocam movies and stills of the tornado itself, everything is here for both the novice and the expert to appreciate this rare weather event. Detailed figure captions and a link to a glossary make sense out of jargon. And for those whose appetite is whetted, there is also a link to the award-winning Storm Chaser Homepage at http://taiga. geog.niu.edu/chaser/chaser.html, which connects you to literally dozens of similar reports and much more.

http://www.infobahn.com/ pages/anagram.html

Sick of science and technology? Join the 300,000-plus visitors to "Anagram Insanity." Type in a name or phrase, and this Web site magically spews out all the anagrams in the English language that can be created from your input. For example, astronomer Clifford Stoll has recently penned a jeremiad entitled Silicon Snake Oil (Doubleday, 1995) that details the overblown promises of Internet technology. The book is 248 pages long, but using "Anagram Insanity" I can boil it down to a threeword anagram of its title: "loosen ASCII link." For those who use e-mail to stay in touch with relatives, here is a more upbeat anagram of Stoll's phrase: "liaison close kin." And so on; this Web site found more than 200 anagrams for this phrase, far more than I would have ever been able to dream up on my own! It is sort of an interactive fortune cookie, and a superb timewaster. But it is also, at root, a very simple example of an interactive numerical model. Tomorrow's Web will let you do the same with more complex models: for example, simulating traffic flow during your morning commute or custom-designing a weather forecast for an upcoming barbecue.

ZONING LAWS FOR CYBERSPACE

It is one thing to visit an interesting Web site, still another to understand why it is interesting. What laudable attributes make these sites examples of the highest and best use of cyberspace, in my opinion? Aside from intelligent on-screen organization - a must - one or more of them aspire to:

wide accessibility to otherwise perishable information

maximum use of visual storytelling (movie loops, color-coding)

user-specified interactivity (still in embryonic stages)

juxtaposition of complementary data sources (observations and models, weather maps and video)

authoritative interpretation (captions on figures, links to glossaries, explanations)

These sites also circumvent two technical difficulties of the Web: they generally avoid useless eye candy graphics which explain nothing and take forever to download, and their Web addresses do not change frequently, making them reliable sources of information.

Does your Web site, or that of your university, department, or firm, make the most of its abilities? Try out these zoning laws on your favorite Web site (or one you hate) and tell me what you think. I can be found at the following address: [email protected].

John Knox is a post-doctoral researcher in the atmospheric sciences at Columbia University and the NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Spring 1997
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved