September 2002 Archives
Practically every time I hear a politician talk about the Internet these days he or she is talking about the failure of broadband to take off and save the economy. The Washington Post has this analysis
Industry experts say business broadband hasn't ripened to its potential because of basic capitalist tenets. The major providers haven't found a financial incentive to speed up their deployment. A score of smaller corporate-sector providers couldn't survive the technology bust. And cable companies, which preside over neighborhoods, have branded themselves more heavily to the bedroom surfer than to the business manager.
Business Week had an even more trenchant critique:
SIMPLE SELLS. What's missing from this theory is a little analysis. Historically, communication has been far more prized than content. Annual movie-ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10 billion, notes Andrew Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota and author of a 2001 paper "Content Is Not King." Phone companies collect that amount every two weeks.
Being curious, and a U of MN student, I followed the information to Andrew Odlyzko's home page and paper.
MIT has released OpenCourseWare to the public in a pilot version today. The BBC has a story about the release. Here's a link to the official OpenCourseWare web site.
For a final quote:
"There is no revenue objective for OCW, ever. It will always be free," insisted Ms Margulies.MIT staff point out that if this initiative is successful, and other institutions follow, it will put the net back on track towards its original goal of sharing information and knowledge around the world, rather than selling CDs and t-shirts.
At my presentation on Creativity and Computers to the World Future Society I argued that part of the amazing power of current technology is the ability of the computer to begin working on abstract data structures that actually have meaning to people. XML and the Semantic Web are two of the major drivers behind this effort. Blogging and RDF syndication are another example. So here is the long route to a really cool tool.
I started on CodingtheWeb, went to the FuzzyBlog, which took me to the FOAF-a-matic, the RDF-web, semantice vaporware for the masses (I love that subtitle) and then onto an article about the technology XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF
These are the connections that the web is so great about creating.
Communities everywhere
Many communities have proliferated on the Internet, from companies through professional organizations to social groupings. The FOAF vocabulary, originated by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, gives a basic expression for community membership: describing people and their basic properties such as name, e-mail address, and so on.FOAF is simply an RDF vocabulary. Its typical use is akin to that of RSS: You create one or more FOAF files on your Web server and share the URLs so software can use the information inside the file. Like creating your own Web pages, the creation of your FOAF data is decentralized and within your control. An example application that uses these files might be a community directory where members maintain their own records. However, as with RSS, the really interesting parts of FOAF come into play when the data is aggregated and can then be explored and cross-linked.
I haven't managed to create any of my own FOAF files yet. I'm still trying to catch up with some basic enhancements to my own site, but the future marches on, whether we're there to see it or not.
Jim Collins has a perceptive interview in Fast Company explaining why some companies succeed and others fail.
Here's the essential truth of our current situation: The real problem has stayed the same, regardless of the direction of the market. First we went through a spiraling-up phase, and people lost their bearings as they got caught up in the great melee of opportunity. Now we're in a downward spiral, and people have lost their bearings in a scramble of uncertainty. It's the exact same pattern in reverse: people merely reacting to circumstances, rather than doing anything fundamentally creative.
If a company focuses on making creative contributions that fall in the middle of three intersecting circles -- what it is passionate about, what it can be the best in the world at, and what best drives a sustained profitable economic engine -- then growth will likely follow.
The same holds true for creative people who discover what they are passionate about, what they are genetically encoded for, and how they can build an economic engine based on their contributions. Those who operate at the intersection of all three circles are more likely to face the problem of too much opportunity in their lives, not too little.
One of the graduate school programs I've been looking at is the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Here's there announcement of an open house only a few weeks away.
The Interent Engineering Task Force working group on calendaring.
James Fallows is one of my favorite foreign affairs correspondents and his new article at the Atlantic nicely summarizes the potential problems America would face after a war with Iraq.
Dan Bricklin has a short and thoughtful essay on why most people don't program computers. In summary he says that most programming languages break the 4 design rules proposed by Donald Norman in The Design of Everyday Things.
- Visibility. By looking, the user can tell the state of the device and the alternatives for action.
- A good conceptual model. The designer provides a good conceptual model for the user, with consistency in the presentation of operations and results and a coherent, consistent system image.
- Good mappings. It is possible to determine the relationships between actions and results, between controls and their effects, and between the system state and what is visible.
- Feedback. The user receives full and continuous feedback about the results of actions.
According to Bricklin:
A traditional, "typed statement" programming environment (traditional "procedural" or "declarative") falls down on all of these. It is often very difficult to determine the relationships between operations and results. The feedback is not continuous -- because of syntax constraints there are many times that a program being modified is not in a state where you can see the results.
I just read a portion of Information Ecologies by Bonnie Nardi for a class I'm currently taking and just now realized that she is the same author who wrote A Small Matter of Programming, which I read a few months ago. Small Matter was about giving users the ability to program their computers, Information Ecologies focused on the metaphors used to describe technology. Both of them support Bricklin's contention that computers have not been designed to be easily programmable by users. Otherwise I, and the rest of the technical support infrastructure in the world, would probably be out of a job.
via CamWorld
Found this reference link at CodingStyle for when I get time to be interested in secure programming techniques.
Clay Shirky has been writing a series of provocative essays on the line between broadcasters and community organizers. How does digital technology change or alter that line? His most recent is Broadcast Institutions, Community Values
Via Tomalak's realm an article, from Technology Review, on the preservation or loss of digital artifacts.
“The layman’s view is that digital information is more secure, when in fact it’s far more ephemeral,” she says. “We know how to keep paper intact for hundreds of years. But digital information is all in code. Without access to that code, it’s lost.”
Harvey Blume takes E.O. Wilson, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright to task in comparison to Stephen Jay Gould. The Origin of Specious : And why reductionists are winning the Darwin wars.
Gould's science and literary style owed more to art and artists than to algorithms. His opponents' approach to art, on the other hand, is, as a rule, so doggedly reductionist as to sow doubts about their whole enterprise. It is painful, for example, to read Wilson, so often a superb writer himself, as he attempts to squeeze every artistic motif known to man into a few universals consistent with a genetic approach to human culture. Gould was concerned that human culture and history not be boiled down to code. There were times one felt that what offended him most about his foes was not the particulars of their argument but the relentless monism driving it. He called Pinker, Dennett, Dawkins, et al. hyperselectionists, pan-adaptionists and, when truly annoyed, out and out Darwinian fundamentalists. But sometimes he simply called them hedgehogs. The hedgehog, according to one of his favorite parables, knows only one thing and is determined to explain everything with it. Gould identified with the fox, which is a pluralist; Darwin was a fox, he said, and nature is, too.With Gould gone, the hedgehogs control the Darwinian heights. It would be nice to have at least one fox around to right the intellectual balance. But there seems no one now prepared to brave, and perhaps dull, their needles.
The Street Finds its Own Use for the Law of Unintended Consequences is a brilliant essay by Cory Doctorow on technology and innovative, but unpredicted uses for technology.
Another example of how technology always has unexpected results comes from increased bullying via cell phone text messaging systems in England.
An interesting review of the new book Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychdelics is online at alternet.
A good quote:
Barlow writes that he knows full well that as a user and an observer of Grateful Dead culture that the public's fear of LSD is misplaced. Yet, like many others, he has kept quiet. He writes that by concealing the truth, "I participate in a growing threat to the minds of America's young greater than anything which acid presents. I mean by that the establishment of permissible truth in America. In a word, totalitarianism. Alcohol, nicotine, and prescription sedatives do more damage every day than LSD has done since ...1943."
More from the Scout report: this time on bioinformatics.
The purpose of these pages is to provide an overview of the rapidly evolving field of bioinformatics. We define bioinformatics as a discipline that generate computational tools, databases and methods to support genomic, molecular and medical research. This research basically comprises the study of DNA structure and function, gene and protein expression, protein production, structure and function, genetic regulatory systems, etc.In this page you will find links to the most representative genomic databases and tools, tutorials, data and software providers, public and private research centres, relevant paper references, reviews on articles and products, etc.
The wonder of the web is the links you start to follow. From my last adventure at the Lemelson Center I found this: the Playful Invention and Exploration Network, sponsored by MIT and a hosted by SMM.
There's even a listserv for announcements from the Lemelson center.
A couple of different thought threads have been going through my mind the last month about the importance of play in my own life. A religious friend gave me a book called The Fabric of Faithfulness about the role of a college education in shaping our life stories and faiths. Although I'm not persuaded by the theistic arguments I did start thinking about how I would describe my personal, atheistic beliefs.
From there I was reminded of one of the best books I've ever read, Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse. He concludes that book by saying "there is but one infinite game." And that infinite game, in my humble opinion, is nothing less than life itself. An infinite game is a game that is played with the only purpose of keeping the game going.
So, from the NDSL Scout report, I find this link to a site created by the Lemelson Center for the study of invention and innovation and the Science Museum of Minnesota, where I work as a volunteer. The site is called "Invention at Play" and contains some great examples of online games, including tangrams (one of my personal favorites). So my theories of play, creativity, and the meaning of life coincide in cyberspace. This many personal obsessions in one place can be a bit heady.
Slate.com is running an interesting series by Robert Wright, author of Non-Zero and The Moral Animal, on the response to terrorism. He makes a number of points that need to be remembered:
Proposition No. 2: For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people. They won't have to claim that they speak on behalf of a whole religion. They'll just have to be reasonably intelligent, modestly well-funded, and really pissed off....Propositions 2 and 3 together give us our first italicized policy principle: Prescription No. 1: Take your bitter medicine early. Often in the course of human events—or in the course of just living your life—you can either bite the bullet now or bite it later. In the stock market, for example, America enjoyed a wild ride in the 1990s and is now paying the price; alternatively, it could have shown more discipline and circumspection then and enjoyed more stable prosperity now. Who's to say which is better? Not me. But in the case of terrorism, I have a decided preference because in 10 or 20 years, terrorism will have much more lethal potential than it has now.
Technology and computers make terrorism easier and give us the tools to respond at the same time. The war, if you wish to call it that, on terrorism will be a fine balancing act between technology, politics, and economics; something that more of us need to realize and then tell our political leaders.
Here's one of the best articles I've seen on evangelical millenial fiction, exemplified by the Left Behind books.
When I went to college (early 1990s) one of my relatives gave me a copy of This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. I started reading it but stopped after 50 pages - I knew what was going to happen already. In general I try to avoid wasting my time reading books where I know what the final answer will be. I want art to surprise me. There are exceptions when I read books where I know what the final result will be and, in those cases, I'm just as guilty as anyone of reading books that affirm my own prejudices.
When I worked at Barnes and Noble (mid 1990s) I shelved the first few LaHaye and Jenkins books in the religious fiction section. Since then I've observed that the religious fiction sections in bookstores continue to grow. The fiction doesn't lead me to any new thoughts but I believe it can be interpreted as a useful indicator of the rhetoric of evangelical Christianity in America.
