Planet Blogos

NFC

2011-04-07T13:27:00.001-07:00

Well, no sooner do folks in the library start using QR codes than
the latest thing becomes NFC.
With respect to folks using QR codes...

"If you haven't, you probably never will. That technology, QR Codes, is on its way out. It's going to be replaced by near-field communication chips that ship with phones and provide a much easier way to accomplish many of the same tasks." .... "Indication of the change comes from Google, which quietly phased out support for QR Codes from its Google Places service earlier this week. When Places launched, businesses could put a sign with a QR code in their front window. Passersby could scan the sign and their mobile browser would launch the Google Places page for the business, with information like reviews and special offers."

What Fortune Can Effect In Human Affairs, And How To Withstand Her

2010-05-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

The Prince --

IT is not unknown to me how many men have had, and still have, the opinion that the affairs of the world are in such wise governed by fortune and by God that men with their wisdom cannot direct them and that no one can even help them; and because of this they would have us believe that it is not necessary to labour much in affairs, but to let chance govern them. This opinion has been more credited in our times because of the great changes in affairs which have been seen, and may still be seen, every day, beyond all human conjecture. Sometimes pondering over this, I am in some degree inclined to their opinion. Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.

I believe the Middle Ages, developed the notion -- Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi --
where the wheel of fortune could not be modified. M. tried to insert the notion of free will into the experience of chance in the world. There's a lesson in there.

How we became posthuman

2010-05-23T07:32:00.000-07:00

Hayes distinguishes between the presence/abscence axis, and the pattern/randomness axis. Traditionally, the focus of the economy was on 'possession' -- the presence of resources within the control of an entity. In the postmodern economy -- the information is the key axis/focus . This is simply common information economy manifesto-speak. However, Hayes analyzes the possibility of the dematerialization of information more deeply. is it really possible to cyborgize humanity? isn't it true that all information has to be present in some manifestation?

"even though information provides the basis for much of contemporary society, it is never present in itself."

Because they have bodies, books and people have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that has traditionally marked the experience of reading no less than it has marked the experience of living as embodied creatures.

cynics in the organization

2010-05-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

Dave Snowden, says ..
"At a recent session with a few CEOs I has asked for my three ideas that would help them cope with uncertainty. I don't what they expected but I said:

Seek out those people in your organisations or advisory groups who everyone wants you to avoid and given them the time and space to say why. You will waste some time, but you will increase the range of options you scan.
If you involve experts in decision making when the field is in a state of fluctuation, always create dissent and contrariness.
Remember it's the cynics in the organisation who care about it, not the people who are just trying the say the right thing."

clocks and clouds

2010-05-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

From Wired:

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

coins and html5

2009-05-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

HTML now supports inline microformats. I know coins already has a solution to this,
but if we join that scheme we can leverage other microformat software.

Any element can have an item attribute.


<div>
<p itemprop="a">1

<p itemprop="a">2

<p itemprop="b">test

</div>

so, I suggest the following which also will work with standard COinS software.  It does however violate
a goal of coins, which is to have empty content.
Following the example at http://ocoins.info/

<div>
<span itemprop="Z3988" class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.issn=1045-4438">ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.issn=1045-4438</span>
</div>

according to the COins standard the span should be empty, but I don't know what to do about that.

<div>
<span itemprop="Z3988" class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.issn=1045-4438"></span>
</div>

I don't know whether this would work better:


You might be able to obtain this item.
<span itemprop="Z3988" class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.issn=1045-4438"></span>
</div>

or this:

You might be able to obtain this item.
<coins itemprop="Z3988" class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.issn=1045-4438">
</div>

or this:
<div item="info.coins">
You might be able to obtain this item.
<coins itemprop="info.coins.Z3988" class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.issn=1045-4438">
</div>

Scenarios

2008-11-12T17:29:00.000-08:00

Everyone is busy 'retrenching', and 'looking for efficiencies'. Why don't we look for efficiencies all the time? This was not unforseeable, and should have been on the radar as a possibility. So, how do we react?

Fantasies

2008-09-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

And we see that the mind in its passions rather deceives itself by creating a false and fantastical object, even contrary to its own belief, than not have something to work upon...

Of software and sorcery

2008-08-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

"Instead, their vivified creations often resemble those of Frankenstein—helpless, unhelpful, maddeningly stupid, and prone to accidental destruction."
To paraphrase, the difference between good design, and bad is like the difference between lightning, and a lightning bug.

Strategy Safari

2008-06-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

Discusses all (as yet) ways of conceiving of strategy, both as methodologies, and as schools of thought and how they influenced each other. There are 10 methodologies, and they
range from the heavily 'resource' influenced, and analytical -- figure out how to deploy your
resources -- find an empty slot in the market place -- to the visionary -- think of your happy place, and go there -- the last school is the integrative, which makes use of all of them. There has
been a lot of thinking in the past 30 years, and just calling something strategy, and thinking
there is a single definition for this is not going to work. Resources? Learning? Environmental?
cultural? processal?

Implicit Culture as a Tool for Social Navigation

2008-03-28T20:21:00.000-07:00

"Implicit Culture is the relation between a set, and a group of agents such tahat the elements of the set behave according to the culture of the group". People tend to behave like other people,
but on the web, it's hard to know what the behavior of other people is -- there are no footprints,
traces, left on the sites by people whose footprints you recognize -- so it's hard to behave like other people do. Even when users access the same databases, their mechanisms of use are rarely as productive as experienced users. Perhaps something like shiftspace, shiftspace.org, could help with the footprint aspect. This paper discusses one sample system that uses an agent based system to
find links that might be useful to a specific group.

Artificial Life: An Overview

2008-03-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

An Evolutionary Approach to Synthetic Biology: Zen and the Art of Creating Life, Thomas Ray
We have only encountered one kind of life -- so we need to create digital life, to find out what
life really requires. 'Inoculation of evolution ... into the medium of the digital computer.'
At the moment we don't know what the important features -- but we will choose with
natural selection; natural selection requires death. 'These are not models of life', but different forms of life. This particular essay talks about how to create life -- see his work on Tierra.

The process of evolution by natural selection is able to create complex and beautiful information processing systems (such as primate nervous systems) without the guidance of an intelligent supervisor. Yet intelligent programmers have not been able to produce software systems that match even the full capabilities of insects. Recent experiments demonstrate that evolution by natural selection is able to operate effectively in genetic languages based on the machine codes of digital computers (Ray 1991a, 1991b, 1994c). This opens up the possibility of using evolution to generate complex software (Tierra)

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

2008-03-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

1) Positive Feedback isn't always bad,
2) Randomness can help create order,
3) A Flock isn't a big bird,
4) A traffic Jam isn't just a collection of cars,
5) The Hills are Alive.

paraphrases -- the virtuous cycle is responsible for emergent order -- randomness is what you NEED to create order -- planning is impossible for the units involved in creating the order -- they are incapable of planning. -- levels of interaction -- the cars can be moving forward while the jam is moving backward. the environment itself interacts with the items.

Harnessing Complexity

2008-03-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

Harnessing Complexity by Robert Axelrod, and Michael Cohen / a framework for using complexity, unleash the notion of populations, using strategies, in patterned interactions, by means of artifacts. We can't predict the future, but perhaps we can use the pattern of interactions to drive the selection of the best strategies.

Knowing and Indexical Psychology

2008-03-05T19:18:00.000-08:00

Knowing and Indexical Psychology in Rethinking Knowledge Management --

Several concepts: 'The inner is a delusion' and 'the conduit metaphor' // knowledge is not a stored thing that can be transmitted, but a series of 'mental events' -- replace the container metaphors with dialogical events

World brain - HG Wells

2007-12-21T17:39:00.000-08:00

The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual. And what is also of very great importance in this uncertain world where destruction becomes continually more frequent and unpredictable, is this, that photography affords now every facility for multiplying duplicates of this - which we may call? - this new all-human cerebrum. It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.

The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia (1937)

What does IQ tell us.

2007-12-12T18:18:00.000-08:00

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?

Michael Cole is part of the center that works on Activity Theory (LCHC ) I would say the fuss is about the fact that the modern definition of intelligence is a series of disembodied abstractions -- but the primal definition of intelligence is related to the activity of the mind in the world.

Context and Consciousness

2007-11-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

Bonnie Nardi quotes the Little Prince:

It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes it
so precious... You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

Google reader, and Scintilla

2007-09-20T20:33:00.000-07:00

Google has the advantage of scale, and Scintilla of focus. The advantage of the Internet has the advantage of being totally distributed, and uncontrolled, and tools like scintilla, and google provide a kind of GroupLens on the river of info.

According to reports of a video accidentally leaked from inside Google, the Google Reader developers have interesting plans for the future. While Scintilla works on a different scale from Google Reader (which is said to store "10 terabytes of raw data from 8 million feeds") and also doesn't aim for the same niche of general-purpose feed reader, there are proposals reported that would help aggregation sites like Scintilla, as well as several features that we've already implemented. Here's a selection of the most interesting:

Brewster Kahle

2007-09-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not surprised that a corporation wants to be the only place someone can get information, and I was not terribly surprised that some libraries went forward with this before they understood how they could do it on their own and how much it would cost to do it for themselves, not only to do the digitization but also to create services around these collections. I was surprised to see more libraries jumping on the Google bandwagon after demonstrating how libraries can do this and after actually doing it with the Open Content Alliance.

A failure in generalship

2007-08-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

A failure in generalship By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling

"You officers amuse yourselves with God knows what buffooneries and never dream in the least of serious service. This is a source of stupidity which would become most dangerous in case of a serious conflict."
- Frederick the Great

First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.

Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation

2007-08-14T23:07:00.000-07:00

Three types of approaches to planning:
1)rational - figure out options, calculate costs, benefits.
2)evolutionist - strategy emerges, is not decided upon, is only recognized after the fact. - 'emergent'
3)processual - is found through the strategic conversation.
Decision makes evaluate alternatives, the various structurally different possibilities,
not decisions, but conditions, and devise 'scenarios' as the basis of conversation.
The point of making scenarios is to make the organization more flexible, and open to change, and to reacting to a changing environment, to recognize signs of a particular scenario coming into play, and being able to deal with it.

The art of reperceiving: scenarios and the future - Commentary

2007-08-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

GETTING THE DECISION MAKER TO REPERCEIVE

The challenge for strategic planners is to help decision makers understand what the future security environment might look like, to affect their perceptions, in essence, to help them "reperceive." Wack, who gained some fame as a strategic planner during the oil crises of the 1970s with his ability to get the senior executives in Shell Oil to understand what might happen in the energy business, wrote in the Harvard Business Review some years later:

Scenarios deal with two worlds: the world of facts and the world of
perceptions. They explore the facts but they aim at perceptions
inside the heads of decision makers. Their purpose is to gather and
transform information of strategic significance into fresh
perceptions. This transformation process is not trivial--more often
than not it does not happen. When it works, it is a creative
experience that generates a heartfelt "Aha!" from you ... [decision
makers] and leads to strategic insights beyond the mind's previous
reach.

Pierre Wack, "Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids: How Medium-Term Analysis Illuminated the Power of Scenarios for Shell Management," Harvard Business Review (November-December 1985)

Institute of Network Cultures

2007-08-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

Poets have descended from the peaks, which they believed
themselves to be established. They have gone out into the
streets, they have insulted their masters, they have no gods any
longer and dared to kiss beauty and love on the mouth.

Paul Eluard

quoted in The Principle of Notworking
Concepts in Critical Internet Culture,Geert Lovink.

and another quote, from geert lovink,
So far, the educational sector has been slow in terms of adapting network technolo
gies. Institutional infighting between existing disciplines has prevented
higher education to become truly innovative. Universities worldwide are in
the iron grip of Microsoft. The use of free and open source software is mar-
ginal, if not straight-out forbidden. ...
Speaking of 2005, the study of mobile devices is still in a premature phase.
...
Networks constantly undermine the
stable boundaries between inside and outside. While networks provoke a
sense of liberation they install themselves into everyday life as ideal
machines for control.

Meta is better

2007-07-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

We visited a garden in Toronto, and saw a garden designed by yo yo ma. Part of the garden had a odd variety of redwood, which is we know now is called the 'Dawn Sequoia'. I saw that sign which I could
not resist referring to in this post.The music garden

Avatars of the Word

2007-07-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

As James O'Donnell said, here: "Universities are triumphant testimony that technologies rarely supplant one another" JOD notes St. Jerome and Cassiodorus were transitional figures, in the transitional moment from textual / scroll culture to textual / codex culture. Those figures offer us some glimpse of what it is like to live in a transition from one knowledge paradigm to another. We have stopped noticing that the codex, the 'book', is also a technology in the same way we have stopped noticing that printing is also a technology. In comparison to the scroll, the codex allows random access to any part of a text - makes possible indexes - concordances - side by side comparision in a way that the scroll could only dream of. Criticism of the printed book included the statement that 'one cannot compare and correct various versions of a text, as they are all the same'. Well, that's true but publishers could afford to proof read when they were chunking out many copies of a work in a way not possible when copies were copied by monks. Now we in the modern hypertext world can restore the immediacy, and the mutability of text - who knows if a web page will say the same thing today as yesterday - or will be in the same place?
I don't fee that I have done justice to work - see this work's home page for more discussion.

Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature

2007-07-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

Although the discussion of the internet is actually pretty short - the discussion on 'Adventure'
is, fairly insightful. He develops a scheme for classifying hypertext - along dimensions of
interactivity, time variability, and several other dimension. He makes the excellent point that non-linear text has existed before 'computer hypertext'. He gives the examples of:
I-Ching, cent mille milliards (Queneau) which allows creating 10^14 sonnets. In fact hypertext
on the machine - can be more controlling than a random access codex (also known as a book).

Personal Semantic Webs

2007-06-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

Following up on my last post, I can see that much topic map work has shifted in emphasis from explicitly using that term to using some other term. The work discussed here points to the growth of local tools that can extract metadata from local or remote files, and create various kinds of compound entities from those files. Similar to the scholar's work bench.

Topic Maps

2007-05-31T13:12:00.000-07:00

Maybe I have missed what is going on, but I have not seen a lot of topic map activity.
This description
may be the last thing I have about topic maps. They seem so ideal for describing relationship between topics, and noting the occurrences of topic, and so on. I guess this is a case of the
good is the enemy of the best. Until a technology is so obvious that no one has to explain it, it cannot become accepted.

Self Organizing systems

2007-03-26T15:32:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to characterize in my own mind what characteristics a system must have to be self-organizing. This particular paper: Self-organizing systems research in the social sciences: notes that we need to move from using 'self-organizing' as a metaphor to a genuine modeling technique. Capra (1996, p. 82-83) notes that the “most important property is that it is a network pattern. … The pattern of life, we might say, is a network pattern capable of self-organization. This is a simple definition, yet it is based on recent discoveries at the very forefront of science.” There need to be concrete models, and modeling techniques in order to actually make progress in this area. Network theory, cellular automata, and so on, offer different techniques for studying these objects. As the article said, sometimes this talk of 'self-organizing' is more in the line of offering metaphors rather than actually testable hypotheses.

Introducing Social Networks

2007-03-25T19:26:00.000-07:00

Introducing Social Networks, Degenne, and Forse - is an introduction to
social networks. An important point is that simply analyzing people by their characteristics age, sex, occupation is not adequate. I think this was always obvious to other people in the social networks arena - but you have to see, not just the individual characteristics of people - but their connections to each other, and this will not be visible in a purely demographic analysis.

Creative Space:

2006-10-25T07:34:00.000-07:00

Just a reading report on Creative Space.
To quote:we stress that creativity uses a-rational abilities of the human mind, but we try to rationally explain and analyze these a-rational abilities.

Earlier works have discussed the SECI spiral, which, I think, emphasizes the social role of knowledge, and has been noted to have an 'Oriental' emphasis. Other work in this area discusses a more 'Occidental', individual - oriented work. This particular work tries to synthese these approaches - a sort of overall map of knowledge creation is proposed, and various paths through the map offer different approaches to knowledge creation.
Personally, while I find this helpful in thinking through how different disciplines seem to use creativity, I am not sure how to actually apply it.

SpecLab @ UVA

2006-07-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

SpecLab @ UVA work on 'pataphysical projects, among others,
treating the rules of the game, as part of the game.

The game promotes self-conscious awareness about interpretation and seeks to encourage collaborative learning. Ivanhoe facilitates the imaginative use of electronic archives and online resources in combination with traditional text-based and visual research materials

Semacode bar codes for the world.

2006-07-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

Attaching codes to everything.
For instance, Semapedia

2006-07-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

Programs, Life Cycles, and Laws of Software Evolution
Meir M. Lehman Proceedings of the IEEE Vol 68 No. 9 , Sept 1980 pp 1060-1-76

5 Laws: (paraphrased)
I A Software System, if it is being used, changes or dies.
II A Software System increases in complexity unless work is done to decrease the complexity.
III Program evolution is subject to laws which describe its dynamics.
IV During the active life of a software system, the global activity rate is statistically invariant.
V During the active life of a software system, the release content is
statistically invariant.

Programs change. They get more complicated, unless you simplify them.
They can be described by statistical regularities. Organizations tend to apply the same amount of work to a software system. Releases tend to incorporate about the same amount of change.

I think we have reached an inflection point now, in some systems, like switching systems,
microsoft windows, perhaps other software system, where they are so complex, that it is
now impossible to manage their change.
Perhaps some problems have arisen lately by those in the industry trying to disregard these
laws.

PBS | I, Cringely . June 29, 2006 - If we build it they will come

2006-07-02T16:39:00.000-07:00

PBS | I, Cringely . June 29, 2006 - If we build it they will come :
building our own infra-structure - but what does that mean?
How does a local community that cannot even pay for cafeteria
workers pay for this?

"We have an alternative model in the road system: The roads themselves are funded as infrastructure because the value is from having the road system as a whole, not the roads in isolation. You don't put a meter on each driveway. Tolls, fuel taxes, fees on trucks, etc. are ways of generating money but they are indirect. Local builders add capacity; communities add capacity and large entities create interstate roads. They don't create artificial scarcity just to increase toll revenues -- at least not so blatantly."

Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

2006-06-22T14:06:00.000-07:00

Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design: "In Otlet’s world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document." As the web is now - the
behavior of users, and their usage of items has mostly no effect on how an item appears to others -
The exceptions: google: knows who you link to, and who links to you - del.icio.us - knows how people have tagged your page:

This is a fascinating article about someone I knew nothing about.

Visualizing an historical semantic web with Heml

2006-06-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

Visualizing an historical semantic web with Heml
describes a language for talking about historical events, and linking them
to people, and places, together with tools for showing timelines, and maps.

Collection Metadata

2006-05-19T18:24:00.000-07:00

A new article aboutCollection Metadata.
”Beware of The Blob, it creeps
And leaps and glides and slides
Across the floor
Right through the door
And all around the wall
A splotch, a blotch
Be careful of The Blob”

Last words of buddha.

2006-04-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

"Transient are all component things, strive on with diligence."

wiki calc

2005-11-12T06:58:00.000-08:00

Dan Bricklin, Co-inventor of VisiCalc, has announced an alpha version of WikiCalc. He call it an editor for "structured" data. Wiki like, but providing more structure for the data - what I would call "microformats". Other things that are similar: fitnesse and WikiD.

People have been working with editors that run out of the browser for a while now - but this will be a big step toward eliminating that enemy of structured data - the spread sheet. And who better to do it, than the co-inventor of the spreadsheet in the first place?

cellorg biological/chip hybrid

2005-10-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

Living bacteria have been incorporated into an electronic circuit to produce a sensitive humidity gauge.

The device unites microbe and machine, taking advantage of the properties of both to make for a supersensitive sensor.

"As far as we know, this is the first report of using microorganisms to make an electronic device," says Ravi Saraf, a chemist from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, who developed the 'cellborg' with his student Vikas Berry.

"This is essentially a first step towards a biological computer, and would have many applications," says Steve Ripp, a biotechnologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ripp was part of a team that developed a sensor that relied on glowing bacteria to detect chemicals. But in their system, the electronic circuits were simply reacting to the bugs, and they weren't hooked up to each other, he notes. Saraf's humidity sensor melds the two together.

Ripp says that interest in these cellborg circuits is growing fast. "If you detect a chemical with a biological device, you not only sense its presence but also its effect on a living system," he says.

radios cooperate to communicate

2005-09-24T14:51:00.000-07:00

Center for Wireless Technology
is working on "smart" radios to form cognitive networks.
I have see discussions of using WI-FI to form networks for communication
bypasses in disaster situations. But I have never heard discussion
of both GNU Radio and cognitive engines in this context.

CWT’s approach is that, “The new cognitive radios are similar to living creatures in that they
are aware of their surroundings and understand their own and their user’s capabilities and the governing
social constraints,” said Center director Charles W. Bostian, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Electrical and
Computer Engineering.

Endosymbiosis / co evolution / evolution by cooperation

2005-09-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

For some time biologist Lynn Margulis has been arguing that evolution may proceed through close contact between close relationships between organisms. For instance,
she has argued that eukaryotic cells are the created by symbiosis between
three or four types of bacterials cells. This theory, Serial Endosymbiotic Theory of Euckaryotic Cell Evolution, (SET) has solid supporting evidence based on nucleic acid, microsructure,
and dynamics.
Margulis has also argued that evolution may proceed more through
symbiogeneis than through "natural selection".

Archaeal- eubacterial mergers in the origin of Eukarya
See Proc. Natl. Accad. Sci. USA
Vol. 93, pp. 1071-1076, February 1996 Archaeal- eubacterial mergers in the origin of Eukarya: Phylogenetic classification of life
LYNN MARGULIS

She also argues that treatment of disease may be improved by analyzing
the relationship between the parties as a faulty symbiosis,
Endosymbioses: cyclical and
permanent in evolution
Lynn Margulis and Michael J. Chapman
TRENDS IN MICROBIOLOGY 342 VOL. 6 NO. 9 SEPTEMBER 1998

How does this apply in the software arena?

Software companies, of course, compete, but, may in fact also grow by incorporating complementary software units. All software grows to include a news reader, for instance. This rule may now be modified to include: all software evolves to incorporate an rss feed reader.

Those incorporated units maintain their own functions, but perform that function within the environment of the software.

Open Source software may evolve faster, perhaps, because cooperation may be
emphasized, and encouraged, in contrast to the ecosystem of competition.
see Evolution of Open Source Software

Power walking, really ....

2005-09-08T14:58:00.000-07:00

Where to get power for all those portable electronic devices? Let me take a walk, and think about it. nature.com summarizes a report from Science that biologist Lawrence Rome of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a specialist in animal locomotion, and his co-workers had the bright idea of harnessing power from the vertical motion of a walker's hips. "One could then generate electricity while carrying a load more economically and with greater comfort than with a conventional backpack," says mechanical engineer Arthur Kuo of the University of Michigan. From the abstract, "This electricity generation can help give field scientists, explorers, and disaster-relief workers freedom from the heavy weight of replacement batteries and thereby extend their ability to operate in remote areas." According to The Mercury News, a spinoff called Lightning Packs LLC will develop this technology for commercialization.

Lessig takes aim at the destroyers of the public domain.

2005-09-02T17:07:00.000-07:00

They can’t imagine that freedom could produce anything worthwhile at all.

Thomas Jefferson said something like,
"The earth belongs to the living, and the fruits thereof." This sort of
anti-public domain stance is a example of the dead hand of past reaching out
to strangle the future with the with the blessing of the present.

"IBM and EPFL Join Forces to Uncover the Secrets of Cognitive Intelligence"

2005-07-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

Big Blue announces Neuro mapping project : I don't know enough about neuroanatomy
to comment on this "secrets of cognitive intelligence" but I really doubt that
mapping the brain will actually reveal this. As the previous post noted,
and as noted in other literature - it's probable (in my HO) that
cognitive intelligence is not just one thing, and that it is
an emergent property - rules unfolding over time create the structure, and
make possible the functioning. Looking at a map of a chess board will neither
tell you the rules, nor how the game got that way.
Neither will looking at a particular configuration of a Life board.
So, I doubt this business about "secrets of cognitive, etc", but
modeling the functioning of the brain may actually reveal as the researchers say:

Scientists also hope to understand more about how and why certain microcircuits in the brain malfunction -- thought to be the cause of psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression.

The nature of order

2005-07-19T19:11:00.000-07:00

I have been reading christopher alexander for a while now,
like all programmers involved with patterns.
But the Nature of Order seems like a whole larger scale work, although always implied by his other work.
a) The process of growth is not simply accretion, but by
elaborating on the previously existing "whole".
b) find centers, and emphasize them.
c) design proceeds by "structure preserving" transformations.
d) but, only a certain sort of process can create, and preserve such structure.

Anniversary of Johnson's Dictionary.

2005-07-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

I managed to not notice this, but at least I noticed it in the correct year.

15-Apr-1755 Samuel Johnson published the first truly comprehensive
dictionary of the English language.
This issue
of the oxford journal of lexicography discusses the importance of this.

One of the papers (1) talks about the division of lexicographers
into "lumpers", and "splitters" - "lumpers lump different uses together under single
broadly worded definition" "splitters perceive and record fine distinctions"

(1) (Int. Journal of Lexicography vol. 18, no. 2 Johnson and Modern Lexicography Patrick Hanks.)

Under selection pressure, this species becomes parthenogenic

2005-06-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

Pharyngula::A damsel that doesn't need any knights: But why is this? If it is harder to find a mate, and
the cost of looking for a mate exceeds that of simply reproducing by cloning, then some species
will do that. I am not sure why this is important, but it seems like a metaphor for
something.

ALA Quiet

2005-06-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

Everyone where I work is away at the ALA conference.
So, I was reading bloggers at the conference to see what was
going on
Thing 1)

Silkworm and TALIS.
"Library systems, traditionally, tend towards the monolithic. They are big, they are complex, and they are pretty proprietary. On the whole, the only way for someone to get at the content they store is via the web based interface (and you can see what I think about them) or using complex protocols such as Z39.50."
This is what we have to fight against, and I am glad to see
silkwork/TALIS working on this.

Thing 2)
LITA blog to quote, "The OPAC sucks."

Thing 3)
We have to make our library systems
fit with other system using web services, AJAX, or WEB 2.0.

perl.com: Massive Data Aggregation with Perl

2005-06-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

perl.com: Massive Data Aggregation with Perl we are thinking of aggregating lots of data in a data ware house from web logs.
Maybe this would be useful.

Practical XML: Form Validation

2005-06-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

Practical XML: Form Validation This looks promising as a mechanism to validate pages, and describe pages.

Turning client server into p2p: // What's next after AJAX? |

2005-05-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

What's next after AJAX? | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2005-05-23 | By Rohit Khare. Browsers are so prevalent, and everyone hates
to leave their browser, that I guess we have to do everything from within a browser, even if it does
not really belong there.

TextArc.org Home - Very High Density Text Summary.

2005-05-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

TextArc.org Home shows
mechanisms for summarizing, and showing words, and their use in a text.
If you look at Alice in wonderland, you see that thought shows right up in
the center in large text -- meaning high usage of the word, everywhere.

Internet Alchemy Webapp APIs - A survey

2005-05-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

Internet Alchemy Webapp APIs
A collection of WEB api's. Someone should survey these, determine which ones are RESTful,
what are the commonalities. Are they all SOAP? Do some have their own dtds?

zz structure : Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Nelson: JoDI

2005-05-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Nelson: JoDI - Working with spreadsheets a lot lately - my latest concept was that
spreadsheet cells ought to be able to contain spread sheets.
For some reason, in an excel spread sheet, you can insert a document by reference, but
not another spread sheet. If this were true, your spread sheet could
become a zzstructure manager (?).

Sloganizer.net - Image generator for your slogan.

2005-05-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Sloganizer.net - Image generator for your slogan.: ""
This site generates a new image each time this is accessed, so I don't
know how this will look to you.

Been tried before: Broadband over power lines

2005-05-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

Much as I would like to get my technological news from the Hollywood reported,
I can't say I think this is really going very far:
Broadband over power lines. Although this has always seemed attractive,
this has been tried before, and to and failed to make a dent - when nortel, for one, tried this
they pulled back,
(see this explanation
for a discussion of why.

WHERE IS IT | SCANBUY | Optical Intelligence for your mobile phones

2005-05-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

SCANBUY | Optical Intelligence for your mobile phones discusses consumer oriented barcodes, and it's about time that all the
bar codes on objects were usable by people.
1) Scan a book at the library, and see how much it is on line, and order it.
2) Turn that around. Looking at something in the store, scan it, combine
with the google/world cat service, and find the closest library that has it.
Reserve it, and pick it up on the way home.

2005-05-12T00:36:00.000-07:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Recombinance all the way up ... remixing all the way down

2005-05-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Recombinance all the way up ... remixing all the way down - Lorcan discusses recombinance/remixing of content objects and services. I think this is taking what was always
hoped for with object oriented programming - I remember Bertrand Meyer's ideas about the cafeteria approach to system building,
but applying these ideas broadly across the network, as truly
distributed services.
This approach almost feels like a step away from object oriented approaches, in that
data may come from one site, and be processed by a distal service.
Like good software products, an ecosystem develops around api's and
datasources that are documented, reusable, dependable, and useful.
perhaps we are seeing functional programming happening on a truly massive scale.
Just my 2 nanocents,

jdbc without hibernate

2005-05-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a project using jaxb;
this was relatively pain free.
The next part was very, very painful -
mapping the objects into the relational model.
I decided to use plain jdbc for this, and I can
definitely state that this is a bad way to
go.
for persisting my 96 classes,
I have about 1,400 lines of code, all of
which is very fragile, totally dependent on
small detail of data typing, xml structure.
If we redefine anything in the database:
recompile
If we redefine the xml schema: disaster will
strike.

I am going to have to try to convert this
to hibernate, but I was unsure of my ability
to handle all the mappings when the manually
defined database was constantly changing.

I was afraid to take two steps forward; I tried to
take one step, but I think this was a mistake.

Maybe I should have tried:

jaxb and jdo

wisdom in information

2005-05-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

Paul Duguid gave a talk on the
"quality of information" here at Cornell.
Since this was given to librarians, the focus was on where libraries, and
librarians will fit.
Several points to note:
my paraphrasing:

We have been hoping that Moore's law would help us out
of our info-quagmire-- that better search engines, and organizing tools would
gave us tools to deal with the flood of information. That has not happened.
GooglePrint points to certain print resources but not others.
Why did a result formerly point to a dover edition and then change to a Penguin
edition.

One of his conclusions -- branding is more than a commercial tactic, it is
also a mechanism used in many communities to certify (or decertify) reliability.
My paraphrase: "Disintermediation has failed (?) because one of the
primary functions of the intermediary, in the information realm is to certify,
or legitimate, information as valuable reusable knowledge, and not just
transient assertion."

SDP-city against a vicious circle!

2005-05-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

SDP-city against a vicious circle! is another discussion of these same
software problem. The "Quality without a Name" can only be learned by example. I hope this site becomes an example of QWANicity.

Follow up to transparency: explicability

2005-05-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

Software: your software should have the same characteristics
as your own professional life.

1) Software should be transparent -- what is going should be either
visible, or "visible"-isable, in other words, the operations should be capable
of being made visible. Professionally, you should be able to say what
you are doing, and ..
2) Explicable - why something is happening - should be another characteristic.
Why has a certain relevancy been assigned to a search result?
Show the algorithm -- how were the parameters arrived at? Why were they
applied in this case.

People will not trust our systems if the systems cannot supply this information.
People will not trust us, and they should not, if we cannot supply this information.

(see this post,
Software Engineering for Everyone
by Dennis E. Hamilton
04/04/2001)

folksonomies

2005-04-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

Danny Sullivan thinks open tagging will not work, will be prone to tag spamming.

I think this is the same problem as open software. we should promote accountability in
tagging. of course, I don't know how to reconcile this with privacy. But google works
because people make links to things, in the course of making their own web pages,
and the structure that people build through their own work contributes to everyone's
intelligence. If people could only tag their own work, or their own posts, but
toogle software could use similarity measures to suggest tags for other pages/posts
we would be that much closer to using the collective intelligence of the web
for distributed tagging.

Transparency

2005-04-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

I work in a library, and we use lots of commercial software -
lots of open source software also.

Being in meetings today, talking about commercial software,
I am struck by the lack of transparency in all the products we
are using.
When something does not work - there are no (documented) tools
that help us find out what is happening. Yet support was the
reason we bought these tools in the first place. Support generally,
though, in the real world, only kicks in when something is 100% broke,
not when some feature malfunctions to some degree.

Why is documentation so bad?
Why is commercial software so obscure?
Is this a desirable state? Is it useful to keep customers confused?
But, and this is a consequence of this lack of transparency,
people are very loyal to these products. My own opinion is
that people have learned how to tip toe around problems in the software
they have, and do not want new headaches, unless circumstances force
them to change.
The only hope for the future is
a) open source software
b) open protocols
c) open data definitions

Then there will grow up support businesses whose real business is
support, not software.
Maybe this has already happened around Linux - I am just not knowledgeable
enough.

(comment on this)