Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

Linkoteca. lógica distribuida

Enthusiastic Amateurs Advance Science As They Hunt For Exotic Mushrooms

Imago voragine.net
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By one estimate, there are between 2.2 million and 3.8 million species of fungi — and more than 90% of them aren’t cataloged.

But mycologists (as fungus professionals are known) do get a big boost from a surprisingly sophisticated world of amateurs — both those who tromp through the forests observing oddball species, as well as those who have helped build a community that links the amateurs with the pros.

Sometimes the amateurs come up with stunning discoveries.

Consider the story of Taylor Lockwood, a 74-year-old mushroom enthusiast and professional photographer. This spring, we met in the hills of West Virginia, where he has been prowling the countryside in a van he has converted into a camper, a photo studio and a workshop.

‘Largest Distributed Peer-To-Peer Grid’ On The Planet Laying Foundation For A Decentralized Internet

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“Less than 20 companies actually own more than 80% of the internet capacity, which is the storage and the compute,” de Spiegeleer told me. “It really needs to be something like electricity. It needs to be everywhere and everyone needs to have access to it. It needs to be cost effective, it needs to be reliable, it needs to be independent.”

You use the internet to send a message on a messaging service to a family member across town. As you click Send, the message will most likely travel across your continent and perhaps across an ocean, hit a number of companies’ servers along the way, then ping back, likely on a different route, hitting multiple other companies’ servers as well before arriving at a relatively local switch, ISP, wires, WiFi, and then making it down to your mom’s phone.

The alternative? In a mesh distributed internet, your message to mom might make a couple of hops over local computers, maybe a local ISP, and ping right down to her having traveled not much more than the straight-line distance between you and your favorite parent.

What is IPFS?

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IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data.

What does that mean, exactly? Let’s say you’re doing some research on Aardvarks. (Just roll with it; Aardvarks are cool! Did you know they can tunnel 3 feet in only 5 minutes?) You might start by visiting the wikipedia page on Aardvarks at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark

When you put that URL in your browser’s address bar, your computer asks one of Wikipedia’s computers, which might be somewhere on the other side of the country — or even the planet — for the Aardvark page. However, if you use IPFS to get that page from:

/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Aardvark.html

Your computer might have gotten it from someone else’s computer across town, or maybe even your neighbor’s computer across the street. When you use IPFS, you don’t only download a file from someone else, but your computer can help distribute it, too — when your friend a few blocks away needs the same Wikipedia page, they might be as likely to get it from you as your neighbor.

IPFS makes this possible for web pages, but also for any kind of file a computer might store, whether it’s an MS Word document, an e-mail, an MP3 file, or even a database record.

Skychain

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Medical errors are the third leading cause of death. For example, when doctors analyze X-ray lung images, they fail to diagnose early lung cancer in 69 percent of cases! There are many hundreds of examples like that in healthcare. But artificial intelligence can dramatically reduce the number of such errors!

Skychain intends to provide an infrastructure to radically increase the efficiency of healthcare AI development and training. It will make diagnostic AI systems far more accessible and affordable for the consumer by using blockchain technologies to facilitate safe transactions between the key parties.

The project is based on the revolutionary approach of using smart contracts to bring together many healthcare big data providers whose data is vital for AI training, thousands of independent AI developers, computational resource providers (crypto miners), and millions of consumers.