The Technium

Kevin Kelly is working on a new book, and it should be a doozy.
It's very much a work in progress, but one key point seems to be the following (I'm reading between the lines and haven't read that the lines themselves too rigorously)...

...that the technosphere has a global meta-intelligence of some sort with its own history and perhaps "manifest destiny." He calls this technological species the technium.

A few things I don't think he has quite said yet are

• that the the technium not only predates humanity, it probably created humanity. Or at least co-created humanity. As suggested by the ape scene in the movie 2001: a space odyssey, pre-human tool use must have created selection pressures that radically altered the path our biological evolution would otherwise have taken. As Jimmy Durante noted, clothes make the man.
  
• that the technium evolves by a darwin-esque selection process
• that the resulting meme/gene co-evolutionary process is the real story
• and that (as I argued in "Are Species Intelligent?") there is a very real and theoretically sound sense for thinking of the larger systems of which we are a part as thinking intelligences

Somewhat coincidentally, I am developing a course called Innovation and Invention in Information Technology that touches on many of the same issues. Here's an outline of the topics I have in mind. I would welcome suggestions, references, comments, etc.

➢ Information Technology and the Expansion of Human Potential
• Three possible futures:

• Biology and Technology are Destiny:
Historical and emerging interactions between human nature and technology
Augmenting Basic Human Biology
• The Human Environment:
from tribal campfires to Burning Man
from clothing to wearable computers
• Sensation and Perception:
from eyeglasses to cochlear implants,
from cave paintings to sensor nets to weather.com
• Cognition:
from the abacus to the computer.
from thinking and drawing to simulation and visualization
from pow-wows to teleconferences
• Action:
from levers to robots
from transportation to telecommuting
➢ Augmenting Culture, Society, Technology, and Art
• Collaboration:
from hunting to warfighting
from the tribal village to the global village
• Communication:
from writing to telecommunications
from text to hypertext to collaborative authoring
• Virtualization and Shared Visions:
from cave paintings to virtual realities
from music to multimedia
from barter to e-commerce
from ideas to intellectual property
• Collective Intelligence:
genes, memes and culture
social networks and social network visualization

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium: Recent Innovations in the Scientific Method ...with a comment from me if I pass his screening.

iball $695

http://www.audiovisualizers.com/library/store/iball/iball.htm

How I explained REST to my wife...

How Ryan Tomayko explained REST to his wife... Good metalogue

"...the possibilities are endless.

Each of the systems would get information from each other using a simple HTTP GET. If one system needs to add something to another system, it would use an HTTP POST. If a system wants to update something in another system, it uses an HTTP PUT. The only thing left to figure out is what the data should look like.

Wife: So this is what you and all the computer people are working on now? Deciding what the data should look like?

Ryan: Sadly, no..."

python list comprehensions can be intuitive if you squint

Sexy title, eh?

I read a collaborator's code last night and was struck by the number of times you see things like

newList=[]
....for thisThing in thatList:
........for thisOtherThing in thisOtherList:
............newList.append( somefunc( thisThing, thisOtherThing))

and then we can do something with the newList (or dictionaries; similar story).

This lead me to see if I could make list comprehensions be intuitive. I think I succeeded.

To cut to the chase, the above can be rewritten as

[somefunc(thisThing,thatThing) for thisThing in thatList for thisOtherThing in thisOtherList]

Its not more easy to read with long-winded names like this-- (and easy-reading is usually the highest priority for me and python)-- but it is concise and versatile.

So let's try to make them our friend

Given this,
>>> vec = [2, 4, 6]
>>> newList= [x*3 for x in vec]
>>> newList
[6, 12, 18]

vs, the usual way...

newList=[]
for x in vec:
newList.append( 3*x )

To me, [x*3 for x in vec]was never intuitive. (Apparently the syntax comes from mathematical set theory.)

But here's how I can make it livable: give me a list whose elements are 3*x
where each x comes out of vec

[ give me a list
3*x whose elements have the value 3*x
for x in vec for each x in vec ]

So here are some things you can what you can do with this.

Add inner loops:
>>>[x*y for x in vec for y in vec]
[4, 8, 12, 8, 16, 24, 12, 24, 36]

You you can add conditionals. (this is what python's filter function does)
Let's filter extract all the numbers divisible by 3
>>> [x*y for x in vec for y in vec if x*y % 3 == 0]
[12, 24, 12, 24, 36]

Generate lists of tuples or anything else.
Let's see what numbers generated the last set...
[(x , y, x*y) for x in vec for y in vec if x*y % 3 == 0]
[(2, 6, 12), (4, 6, 24), (6, 2, 12), (6, 4, 24), (6, 6, 36)]

Two times 6 is 12, 4 * 6 is 24... oh, right!-- at least one of the factors must be divisible by 3. You can put multiple ifs in here too.

And, as in our first example, invoke other functions
[multiply(x,y) x in vec for y in vec ]
[2, 4, 6 ]

You could probably extend and nest these things hugely, and achieve all the unreadability of lisp.

Don't do that.

Coincidentally, this topic is in the air these days.
See The fate of reduce() in Python 3000 by Guido van Rossum

Moore on more

Moore on more: "Will the additional computing power you get from following Moore's Law ever get us to computers with the equivalent of human intelligence?
Moore: Human intelligence in my view is something done in a dramatically different way than Von Neumann computers, and I don't think the route we're pursuing now is going to get to something that looks like human intelligence.

I do think, though, that eventually we will change our approach and do things much closer to the way they're done biologically and have a very big chance to get into something that looks for all intents and purposes like human intelligence. But I really don't think it's a simple approach. The amount of power that we would need to do everything the human brain does is probably more than we generate on Earth by our current approach.

"

Quantum Leap

Quantum Leap
Is this cool, or what?

Quantum cryptography allows two parties to send secret encryption keys to each other while testing to see if anyone has attempted to intercept them. The keys are sent, one photon at a time, over standard optical fibers; each photon represents a binary 1 or 0. What makes the system so secure is that any attempt by an eavesdropper to intercept the photons will alter them—alerting the sender to a security breach.

Tool turns English to code TRN 032305

Tool turns English to code TRN 032305: "Tool turns English to code"
Someone went to an awful lot of trouble with this April Fools joke: or went to even more trouble simulating one.

Geopolitics of Green Energy

As promised, Thomas Friedman on Geo-Greening (geo-politics of green energy)

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Geo-Greening by Example: "By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars and we are financing the jihadists - and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian mosques and charities that support them - through our gasoline purchases. The oil boom is also entrenching the autocrats in Russia and Venezuela, which is becoming Castro's Cuba with oil. By doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are also setting up a global competition with China for energy resources, including right on our doorstep in Canada and Venezuela. Don't kid yourself: China's foreign policy today is very simple - holding on to Taiwan and looking for oil.

Finally, by doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are only hastening the climate change crisis, and the Bush officials who scoff at the science around this should hang their heads in shame. And it is only going to get worse the longer we do nothing. "

see also this ($2.95)

Ocean Power Fights Current Thinking

Ocean Power Fights Current Thinking:

This will be the first of several posts on alternative energy. I have a recurring fascination with this problem, and it has been rekindled by Thomas Friedman's trenchant discussions of the links between middle east terrorism and US energy policy.

"Recent advancements in the technology indicate that with a relatively small investment from the government, wave energy could soon compete with other renewable sources.

Wave energy systems place objects on the water's surface that generate energy by rising and falling with the waves. The wave energy in turn moves a buoy or cylinder up and down, which turns a generator that sends the electricity through an undersea cable to a power station on the shore.
...
In addition to having greater energy potential than other renewable sources, ocean energy is viewed as more aesthetically pleasing. Wave energy systems "have less visual impact" than offshore wind farms because they are partially submerged, according to Cliff Goudey, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Fisheries Engineering Research.
...
If testing programs succeed, ocean energy could become cost-competitive with wind energy in as little as four years, according to EPRI's Bedard. However, Bedard is doubtful that the current administration will have a sea change of opinion on ocean energy. "The administration is basically a coal and oil administration," Bedard says."

yet2.com - Tech of the Week Detail

Zoom by Squinting Interesting idea. I wonder what users think?

Invention Is a Flower, Innovation Is a Weed

Invention Is a Flower, Innovation Is a Weed:
Bob Metcalfe begins his article with the question, "Why should you listen to me about innovation?"

Hey, I think the title alone is worth the price of admission.

AJAX analysis: interesting...but wrong.

The Man in Blue makes an interesting point

"While I am suitably impressed with the uses that have brought dynamic retrieval of data via JavaScript into the spotlight of late (Google Maps ... ummmm ... Google Suggest ... ummmm ...) I am yet to be persuaded that it will (or should) have a ground breaking effect upon the Web at large."

... I still see web applications as essentially different from web pages. Much like intranets, they don't have to play nice with other sites or standards (of the non-XHTML kind), because they are closed systems. Their aim is to complete a set task, not to hold linkable, publicly accessible information. When you send an e-mail, do you want its confirmation screen to be recorded in history for public posterity?

I think the essential characteristic defining the divide between an application and a web page is probably this public linkability. If the essence of your project is static information that should be available to a wider community (be it five friends or five continents), then it is most suited to a web page.

Interesting distinction...but I think its wrong. Mightn't you want be interested in a web app where the collaborative development of public links was a dynamic real time activity?

Indeed, I'm not sure I see the value of distinguishing between web apps and web pages. In 1992 I used to have the same problem distinguishing "multimedia" from "web stuff". I now realize the issue was one of communities of practice. Multimedia developers and new-fangled web developers were different people using different tools for different markets and different media. But that was a historical accident. They were actually trying to do the same things and acheive the same effects, and they eventually (I think, sort of) converged.

So what does that imply about when to use and not use AJAX? Um, I think that's pretty obvious--if you want non-disruptive time data exchange with the web browser, its the thing to use.

What's not so obvious is knowing what non-disruptive time data exchange with the web browser is good for. But I think we're getting some really interesting ideas...

Three Futures. Pick One.

Virtual Killing, Real Death

In Hunting, Tech Pushes Envelope of What's Ethical: "A San Antonio entrepreneur recently created an uproar with a Web site, www.live-shot.com , that aims to allow hunters to shoot exotic game animals or feral pigs on his private hunting ranch by remote control, with the click of a mouse, from anywhere in the world."

hmm, let's combine this with an article about missile-equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

"The Predator was first used exclusively for reconnaissance missions, Vanzanten observed. He noted that unlike conventionally piloted aircraft, the UAV can remain airborne over a particular area for up to 20 hours.

Vanzanten also said that Hellfire-missile-packing Predators flew combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

or maybe something about Columbine...?

MusicViz

From Tim Bray...

Giant Steps, Illustrated

Via the reliably-excellent Antipixel, this remarkable animation built around John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Watching it, I feel like someone installed a window in the side of Coltrane’s head and I’m looking in. Don’t miss it.

I still think Music Visualization is a huge untapped opportunity for digital art and information visualization. (Insert plug for my Macroscope Manifesto here.)

Becoming Transhuman, or, whatever happened to the inventor of Virtual Reality Markup Language.

Mark Pesce's Playful World
Becoming Transhuman, video, 72 minutes, 2001.

The first part of this unique video-essay is the best evocation I've ever seen of the fantastic voyage from big bang to death of the universe (including 2001, for example). The latter part is a unique forward-looking personal synthesis of mysticism and science. (and "forward-looking" is an understatement).

Altogether remarkable. This is what the web is for.

Using "found" audio and video sources, Becoming Transhuman is a narrative of what-we-are-becoming, broken into three sections: an affirmation of the positive dimension of human growth, a recognition of the darker side of human nature, and a contemplation of our ever-more-precarious position. It premiered in May 2001 at MINDSTATES.

To play the film, in Real format,
click the link appropriate to your speed:

Becoming Transhuman (DSL)
Becoming Transhuman (ISDN)
Becoming Transhuman (56K Modem)

A small step for the medium. A giant leap for mediakind.

Tim Bray writes...

Jon Udell is really on a roll. He more or less singlehandedly invented screencasting (I first noticed here), and I guess I’m about the last person in the world to have visited his Walking Tour of Keene, NH, which combines Google Maps and GPS and other assorted magic... in case I’m not the last, don’t you be. Something new is happening here.

And he's right. These things ("Interactive Screencasts ?") are not just trying to approximate radio, or a movie. They mark the beginning of a new dynamic video medium with its own integrity and esthetic and with features that cannot be duplicated, in traditional streaming media. That is, I think the what we see Jon doing in these Screencasts --interacting with a dynamic stream of web-mediated activities--is the real emerging phenomena. The Screencasts themselves are "merely" wonderful records of mankinds first steps in a new medium. (Like the video of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, if you will.) (You have to squint to see this in the play-within-the-play of this movie and its predecessor, in which Jon zooms in and out on the map's scale, even as the animation plays.)

Paris Hilton as social disease

Bill Bumgarner offers a nice analysis of mass meme reproduction.

If anything, the Paris Hilton Phoneplosion seems to have confirmed that information wants to be free. That link is actually very interesting in that it delves into the history of the phrase and concept.

It would seem that the economy works something like this:

• A piece of marketable information is obtained. Ethically or not is irrelevant. Hell, whether or not it really happened may not be relevant, either.
• The person obtaining it brags about it in a relatively public forum. This used to often be solely to news agencies of one ilk or another. Now, it is often on any of a number of cracking/phreaking related community sites.
• The information is eventually revealed as either proof of the crack or pursuit of the story, depending on forum. Around this time, money exchanges hands -- either someone packages the information and offers "girls gone wild" style "see celebrity X in compromising position" products (as happened in this case) or a news agency pays money to "own" the story.
• If it is widely considered "newsworthy", the story breaks through channels like DrudgeReport as a "developing story". This creates a frenzy of online interest. For more niche stories, there are other channels of disclosure such as SlashDot, various rumor sites, celbrity oriented sites like gawker, and -- of course -- porn sites.
• If there was any previous event-- such as the Paris Porn Tape-- that could be associated with this event, it is repackaged and sold and/or displayed along with the new event. What is old is new again.
• Now, about 24 hours into the new economy, Google's indexing engine starts producing useful hits. So does Google News, if the story is hitting the press. Once this happens, much wider coverage is sure to follow.
• At this point, the folks in step #3 that are selling the product are likely making some serious cash. It would be interesting to see a graph of sales over time correlated to various disclosure events. At the same time, the content starts popping up in the mainstream; monologues on late night TV, Fark style story repositories, etc...
• People continue to pay for the content, yet-- at the same time-- the content becomes more easily found through free channels. Sales decline, views decline, interest declines.
• ....
• Weeks or months later, the legal system actually starts to make noise in regards to suing for damages, claims against ownership or applying criminal charges. By this time, the event has largely been forgotten within the cultural hive mind and most of the initial events surrounding disclosure-- the pieces of information most important to the legal action-- are now buried in log files, hazy memories or otherwise obscured by the weeks of 'fast culture' events that have occurred since.

So, it appears that an entire economic niche comes into being and fully matures within about 72 hours. Once the market has been established, there is so little cost to keeping the product-- pure information-- on the market that the "buy a snap of Paris's Private life" sites will be with us until taken down simply through someone forgetting to migrate it to a new server.

Come on, people. Can't we do better than default passwords for security products?

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > On the Net, Unseen Eyes:
Oh, and by the way. The focal case in the article concerns security cameras installed in a high school girls' locker room.

"'Just to give some perspective, we have delivered close to half a million cameras, and a Google search produces only a few hundred of them,' Mr. Nilsson said. He acknowledges that default passwords to many camera systems, including those of Axis, are frequently traded over the Internet. Nevertheless, he maintains, Axis cameras are secure against accidental intrusion.

But protecting against accident is not the same as protecting against a deliberate invasion, Mr. Chalos said. 'The images were protected only by the software's default username and password, which the school had never changed,' he said. "

Microsoft: Getting from "R" to "D", and from US to PRC

Microsoft: Getting from "R" to "D"

Their idea: a new type of organization designed to bridge the gap between "R" and "D" and in the process overcome many of the product development bottlenecks and geographic and cultural differences that impede today’s global corporations.

Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) opened in November 2003 with 20 employees and a couple of projects. By late last year, after receiving more than 30,000 résumés from around China and sparking keen demand among Microsoft’s business divisions, it had around 100 employees, with some 17 major projects and scores of minor ones on its books; this year, the ATC is set to double in size. In the next few years, the center expects to be the key technology transfer point for a host of new products, from Web-search technologies to mobile applications and home entertainment systems. On the strength of these innovations, Hongjiang Zhang, the center’s charter director, hopes to provide a powerful alternative to Microsoft’s traditional strategy of creating products in the U.S., spiraling into Europe, and then adapting them for the Chinese market. “China is still emerging, but China is no longer just a follower,” he says. “They are starting to lead.”

Given the size and "foreignness" of the Chinese market this makes great sense for Microsoft. But if that market becomes the world center of technical innovation, the American Era may end.

Web-Reality Interpenetration Art

Access by Marie Sester

Access

(2003) 4'25"
Marie Sester Project Page | Add Webcast to My Artbox

Choose one to view this video selection:
Macintosh: Real 56kbs (modem) | Real 256kbs (DSL)
Windows: Microsoft 56kbs (modem) | Microsoft 256kbs (DSL)

Marie Sester's Access is a public art installation that applies web, computer, sound and lighting technology in which a robotic spotlight controlled by web-users tracks individuals in public spaces. An acoustic beam system directs sounds onto the same tracked persons, projecting audio that only he/she can hear. The individual does not know who is tracking him/her or why he/she is being tracked. Nor is he/she aware of being the only person among the public hearing the sound. The tracker doesn't know his/her action triggers sound towards the target. In effect, both the tracker and the tracked are in a paradoxical communication loop.

adaptive path � ajax: a new approach to web applications

adaptive path � ajax: a new approach to web applications
Jesse James Garrett gives a name to "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML" and says it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.

The biggest challenges in creating Ajax applications are not technical. The core Ajax technologies are mature, stable, and well understood. Instead, the challenges are for the designers of these applications: to forget what we think we know about the limitations of the Web, and begin to imagine a wider, richer range of possibilities.

It’s going to be fun.

Planet Python

Planet Python: Patrick Logan writes,

"I teach a 'whole team' Agile/XP course a half dozen times a year. I emphasize values a much as practices. Communication is the value at the top of the list. We also spend a significant bit of time discussing how to adopt XP. My first (and often repeated) message is, if you can only take one thing out of this course then take the benefits of 'clear communication with your whole team' into whatever practices you do choose.

Not only is communication the most important value it is also the easiest thing to adopt as an individual under any circumstances. Build relationships.

Discovery Channel :: News :: Report Fuels Debate on Mars Life

Feb. 17, 2005 —While evidence for microbial life on Mars mounts, far more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be made, the head of NASA's astrobiology center said Thursday.

In an interview with Discovery News, Michael Mumma said he has been unable to find any scientist studying methane readings on Mars who is familiar with a research paper, supposedly submitted to Nature for review, that reportedly concludes there is strong evidence for present-day life on Mars.

Nature will not comment on papers under review for publication.

Discovery Channel :: News :: Report Fuels Debate on Mars Life

Discovery Channel :: News :: Report Fuels Debate on Mars Life

Feb. 17, 2005 —While evidence for microbial life on Mars mounts, far more work needs to be done before any conclusions can be made, the head of NASA's astrobiology center said Thursday.

In an interview with Discovery News, Michael Mumma said he has been unable to find any scientist studying methane readings on Mars who is familiar with a research paper, supposedly submitted to Nature for review, that reportedly concludes there is strong evidence for present-day life on Mars.

Nature will not comment on papers under review for publication.

Wi-Fi Networking News

If big business is against them municipal networks must be a good idea
Glenn Fleishman is on a roll

Let’s just cut to the chase: municipal networks must be a viable threat or why the pushback?: Why are incumbent telecommunications firms and cable operators so afraid of municipal networks? They must work or they wouldn’t be spending tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and advertising to fight them. You have the touching daily reports of Comcast and Verizon, just to take two examples from today’s New York Times, weeping over how the taxpayers’ dollars will be wasted, how the municipalities can’t possibly understand how hard it is to run networks—news flash: running an electrical utility is tough, too, fellas—and how the whole project will go down in flames.

It fills me with such civic virtue to know that giant telecommunications and cable firms are so full of ruth and kindness that they extend their gaze down to the level of mere towns and cities, their beneficent knowledge of business, ethics, and operational efficiency bestowed upon grateful citizens.

I also enjoyed....

A little thought experiment: let’s pretend broadband was electricity: The Previous Millennium Research Council today released a report that strongly opposes the entry of municipally owned entities into electrical power generation, distribution, and delivery. The PMRC’s report, sent out by telegraph to business centers around this great country, is dated Nov. 1895, although it will take several weeks for sufficient copies to be printed and distributed by rail to business centers.

Electricity is too important a resource for America’s future to be left in the hands of cities and towns, the council argues, which are inefficient enterprises that take profits from industry in their pursuit of ever-greater control of the flow of capital within their borders. “How big may these so-called public utilities grow in their efforts to stifle free enterprise and increase the size of government?” the report asks.

Groupware Bad

Groupware Bad: " The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull the friends into the fold: if one of them starts using the software, they become their own hub, and get the benefit they have already witnessed from a distance.

"

LazyWeb

Email to Ical

LazyWeb, why can't I forward an email to a server, have the server extract event information, and have the email come back as clickable event for ical?

Cybercash on Vacation

A piece of the action (a book to check out)

Joseph Nocera, author of A Piece of the Action, a history of the credit card industry, says digital currency is facing “a chicken-and-egg question” but points out that credit cards encountered the same problem, and that their acceptance took decades. In fact, 2003 was the first year credit cards and other electronic systems carried more payments than bank checks.

As they come to appreciate just how long the road ahead will likely be, some financial cryptographers are searching for niches where they can flourish in the short term. Take, for example, Waltham, MA-based startup Peppercoin, the brainchild of MIT computer scientists Sylvio Micali and Ron Rivest. Peppercoin is attempting to specialize in very small sums (see “The Web’s New Currency,” December 2003).One of its bigger initiatives is developing a cryptographic system that would enable people to use their credit cards at parking meters, an application that would be prohibitively expensive for the traditional credit card network, which has a minimum transaction fee of about a quarter. If Peppercoin’s technology can cut transaction costs enough, it can capture this market and also make it possible for people to spend small amounts online.

Ned Batchelder: February 2005

Ned Batchelder: February 2005: Sand painting
This is Ned Batchelder speaking, but he's exactly right. Don't miss this.

I haven't seen anyone do this before: painting with sand as a stage performance. Ferenc Cako stands over a glass plate, making images in sand with his hands. Each image gives way to the next in waves of curves and shadows. It's quite a virtuoso performance. The subtlety he manages with such crude tools is amazing. "

A Conversation with Alan Kay

A Conversation with Alan Kay:

A wonderful interview; I really admire Kay's attitude, not to mention his brilliance.

SF So Smalltalk is to Shakespeare as Excel is to car crashes in the TV culture?

AK No, if you look at it really historically, Smalltalk counts as a minor Greek play that was miles ahead of what most other cultures were doing, but nowhere near what Shakespeare was able to do.

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

---

I don’t spend time complaining about this stuff, because what happened in the last 20 years is quite normal, even though it was unfortunate. Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture. It’s well known that I tried to kill Smalltalk in the later ’70s...

---

SF If nothing else, Lisp was carefully defined in terms of Lisp.

AK Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

I realized that anytime I want to know what I’m doing, I can just write down the kernel of this thing in a half page and it’s not going to lose any power. In fact, it’s going to gain power by being able to reenter itself much more readily than most systems done the other way can possibly do.

All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

---

This project that we started in 1995 was to make Squeak as an implementation vehicle for another end-user system for children. That was done quite well and is being used by many, many thousands of children around the world. The other way of looking at this is to realize that computers are made to be programmed by human beings. Let’s just roll our own. Let’s not complain about Java, or even about Smalltalk.

In fact, let’s not even worry about Java. Let’s not complain about Microsoft. Let’s not worry about them because we know how to program computers, too, and in fact we know how to do it in a meta-way. We can set up an alternative point of view, and we’re not the only ones who do this, as you’re well aware.

---

our basic language mechanism for both reading and hearing has a fast and a slow process. The fast process has basically a surface phrasal-size nature, and then there’s a slower one. This is why jokes require pauses; the joke is actually a jump from one context to another, and the slower guy, who is dealing with the real meanings, has to catch up to it.

There have been many, many studies of this. This argues that the surface form of a language, whatever it is, has to be adjustable in some form.SF As you probably know, recent research has looked at how different parts of the brain recognize and react to jokes. Physically, they are quite distinct.

AK Yes. All creativity is an extended form of a joke. Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”

---

SF What do you wish you had done differently in the Smalltalk era?

AK I had the world’s greatest group, and I should have made the world’s two greatest groups. I didn’t realize there are benefits to having real implementers and real users, and there are benefits to starting from scratch every few months. I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher, but it took me a long time to realize that I was interfering with them by trying to improve things.

I believe that the only kind of science computing can be is like the science of bridge building. Somebody has to build the bridges and other people have to tear them down and make better theories, and you have to keep on building bridges.

Weather Toaster

Some good links on Qualitative Research and the Association of Internet Researchers from David Eddy Spider's old blog http://gseacademic.harvard.edu/~eddyspda/

[PDF] From "Novelty" to "Community: Exploring New Roles for Technology in a Law School Center" by David Eddy Spider
h2oproject.law.harvard.edu/is98.pdf

a.(o).i.r links
Look in particular under online resources.

a.(o).i.r book listing

• Markham, Annette N. 1998. Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. ISBN: 0761990313.
• Jones, Steve, ed. 1999 (*). Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN: 0761915958.
• Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. ISBN: 0761958967.
  • has the following paper online, from a 1998 conference presentation: IRISS '98: Virtual Ethnography
• Dochartaigh, Niall O. 2002. The Internet Research Handbook: A Practical Guide for Students and Researchers in the Social Sciences. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage. ISBN: 0761964401.

Activity Analysis and Development in a Nutshell

J. Gregory included a link to this in her syllabus. It's a "how-to" on using AT to analyze organizational structure.

The New York Times > Magazine > Lives: Young and Very Inventive

The New York Times > Magazine > Lives: Young and Very Inventive: Nice Profile:

"Young and Very Inventive
By ROBERT GENS as told to EDWARD McPHERSON

As far as I know, I'm the only high-school kid who works at the M.I.T. Media Lab. The graduate students there are about 26 or 27. I'm 17. My free time used to be spent dreaming about things I could eventually build. Now I can point my finger at what it would take to make an idea a reality.... "

InfoWorld: Macromedia and Nokia to bring Flash to phones

InfoWorld: Macromedia and Nokia to bring Flash to phones:

What's the most popular personal computer in the world?

Macromedia and Nokia announced an agreement to integrate Macromedia Flash technology into Nokia's Series 60 Platform for mobile devices, including smart phones.

(the cell phone)

Rotundus AB

Rotundus AB: Another idea Remo, Guy and I and I don't need to implement...



In order to move the pendulum is lifted in the direction of travel, the centre of mass gets displaced in front of contact point between the ball and the ground and the ball starts rolling.

Turning is accomplished by moving the pendulum to either side. The locomotion principle is clearly illustrated in an animation.

CUWIN-- free open source wireless networking software

Wi-Fi Networking News Archives: "CUWiN networks are self-configuring and self-healing -- so adding new wireless nodes is hassle-free, and the system automatically adapts to the loss of an existing node. And, because CUWiN networks are completely ad-hoc, there's no need for expensive central servers or specialized administration equipment.

To set up a network, all end-users need to do is burn a CD with CUWiN's software (which will be available for free at www.cuwireless.net), put the CD into an old desktop computer equipped with a supported wireless card, and turn the computer on. Once the computer boots from the CD, the rest of the setup is completely automated: from loading the networking operating system and software, sending out beacons to nearby nodes, negotiating network connectivity, and assimilating into the network -- all the complicated technical setup is taken care of automatically. Unlike most broadband systems, CUWiN's software builds a local intranet as well as providing for Internet-connectivity -- thus, a town that uses CUWiN's system is also creating a community-wide local area network over which streaming audio and video, voice services, etc. can all be sent.

CUWiN is a cutting edge research and development initiative. CUWiN has pioneered the first open source implementation of Hazy Sighted Link State routing protocol (first developed by BBN Technologies); thus CUWiN's software creates a highly robust, scalable ad-hoc wireless networks. CUWiN's route prioritization metric is based on research conducted at MIT and will automatically adapt to any network topology and local geography.

CUWiNs software is, and always will be, available for free.

"

ACM: Ubiquity - Crafting a Revolution

ACM: Ubiquity - Crafting a Revolution: "...we know that an average on-screen cursor move takes 3.5 seconds (starting with hands on the keyboard). This may not seem like a large amount of time, but cursor motion is a frequent activity. If you move the cursor a hundred times in the course of an hour then you have spent almost six minutes, roughly 10% of your time, getting nothing productive done. Even seemingly small interface inefficiencies add up.

UBIQUITY: What's your alternative?

AZA [Raskin, Jef Raskin's son]: We have a mechanism called 'Leap.' Leap is an incremental search, meaning that when you want to move the cursor, you find where you want to go, hold down the Leap key, and type what you see. The cursor seems to just appear where you want it to be. Once people sit down and use our system, they never want to leave because Leap is that addictive. When I have to work outside of THE, I find myself reaching for the Leap key all of the time.

UBIQUITY: And so you've shown that this is the fastest way to search text?

AZA: Let me give you a comparison. In the same experiment I mentioned before, it took users an average of 1.5 seconds to move the cursor using Leap, yielding a 43% increase of speed when compared with the mouse. With the same hundred-cursor-moves-in-an-hour scenario, you would spend only two and a half minutes positioning the cursor, wasting only 4% of your time."

ACM: Ubiquity - Mark Stefik on Invention and Innovation

ACM: Ubiquity - Mark Stefik on Invention and Innovation: "UBIQUITY: What are the two questions?

STEFIK: This is very simple but also fundamental. The two questions are 'What is possible?' and 'What is needed?' When a workshop identifies a valuable problem, this is the 'what is needed' question. When it explores what could be done with emerging technologies, this is the 'what is possible' question. The magic is in the dance. The business and marketing people tend to have strong insights about what is needed, but they don't have a good grasp of what is possible, especially if it involves advanced technology. So they limit their search to familiar paths. The technology people have a better handle on what is possible, but less insight as to what is needed. When you bring these groups together productively, the marketing guys might say 'I didn't know that was possible' and the researchers might say 'I didn't know you needed that.'"

ACM: Ubiquity - Michael Schrage On Innovation

ACM: Ubiquity - Michael Schrage On Innovation: "... the real story of American innovation is the folks who adopted these inventions and thereby transformed them from mere inventions to full-scale innovations? Who are the great customers?

UBIQUITY: Innovation is something customers do, rather than inventors or entrepreneurs?

SCHRAGE: Exactly. Who are the great clients? Which organizations made the inventions successful in the marketplace of reality, not just in the marketplace of ideas? "

maps.google.com

maps.google.com

These guys are so good its scary...

PacMan Must Die

cheesebikini?: PacMan Must Die

This is an innovative game developed by Holmquist's students at the Viktoria Institute's Future Applications Lab in Göteborg, Sweden. It's a tweaked-out multi-player version of the classic game Pac Man, with two major twists.

The first twist: characters’ roles are switched. Players control ghosts invading Pac Man's home turf, trying to recover the dots stolen by Pac Man in the original game.

The second twist: the playing field is distributed across two or more devices held by multiple players.

More at http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/collgames/

like a terrainium

like a terranium, but not ...

"...The eight-story installation, dubbed the Source, consists of 729 spheres suspended from 81 pairs of cables. Each strand stretches the height of the LSE's 105-foot atrium, and every sphere runs on an internal motor. When connected to a server, the 6-inch orbs form abstract patterns and words, everything from a double helix to news from RSS feeds."

More on the Source, including videos, at http://www.greyworld.org/artwork/source/index.html

Tools for Democracy / Distributed Journalism

Tools for Democracy / Distributed Journalism

A loose association of voluntary info-sleuths is doing an amazing job of ferretting out the story behind the leaking of a CIA agent's identity, alleged by White House partisans seeking to punish the agent's husband for taking issue with the Administration's pre-war interpretation of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (got that?).

The phenomenon ("A loose association of voluntary info-sleuths...") is an even bigger story than the story they are investigating. Watch the world change...

Dan Gillmor points to an excellent example of distributed journalism in action over at Daily Kos. I was completely blown away by what I saw when I got there. I'm still trying to soak in all the background around the Plame Leak / Jeff Gannon thing but, to be honest, the specifics of this event are not as important to me as the general phenomenon occurring there. This seems an obvious glimpse into a future where involvement by the general population in issues of import to the general population is increased substantially. Herewith some rant and analysis of our present toolset and humble suggestion for improvement..."

Nat'l Academies Press, Frontiers of Engineering: (2003), page 32, in chapter Technology for Human Beings

Nat'l Academies Press, Frontiers of Engineering: (2003), page 32, in chapter Technology for Human Beings

When engineers ignore what is known about the physical world and design a technology that fails, we blame them for professional negligence. When they ignore what is known about human nature and design a technology that fails, we typically blame users for being technologically incompetent. The remedy would be for engineers to begin with a human or social need (rather than a technological possibility) and to focus on the interactions between people and technology (rather than on the technology alone). Technological systems can be designed to match human nature at all scales— physical, psychological, team, organizational, and political (Vicente, in press).

The Darwinian Interlude

The Darwinian Interlude

News Flash: "Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over."

Freeman Dyson writes...

Carl Woese published a provocative and illuminating article, “A New Biology for a New Century,” in the June 2004 issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. His main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, and the need for a new biology based on communities and ecosystems rather than on genes and molecules. He also raises another profoundly important question: when did Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution he means evolution as Darwin himself understood it, based on the intense competition for survival among noninterbreeding species. He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life. In early times, the process that he calls “horizontal gene transfer,” the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time. Carl Woese is the world’s greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy. Whatever he writes, even in a speculative vein, is to be taken seriously.

Woese is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, during which horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species. With its superior efficiency, it continued to prosper and to evolve separately. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became another species. And so it went on, until all life was divided into species.

The basic biochemical machinery of life evolved rapidly during the few hundred million years that preceded the Darwinian era and changed very little in the following two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. Darwinian evolution requires species to become extinct so that new species can replace them. Three innovations helped to speed up the pace of evolution in the later stages of the Darwinian era. The first was sex, which is a form of horizontal gene transfer within species. The second innovation was multicellular organization, which opened up a whole new world of form and function. The third was brains, which opened a new world of coördinated sensation and action, culminating in the evolution of eyes and hands. All through the Darwinian era, occasional mass extinctions helped to open opportunities for new evolutionary ventures.

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization. And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

Abstract: We propose a new method to extract semantic knowledge from the world-wide-web for both supervised and unsupervised learning using the Google search engine in an unconventional manner. The approach is novel in its unrestricted problem domain, simplicity of implementation, and manifestly ontological underpinnings. We give evidence of elementary learning of the semantics of concepts, in contrast to most prior approaches. The method works as follows: The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and it induces a probability mass function, the Google distribution, via page counts for combinations of search queries. This distribution allows us to tap the latent semantic knowledge on the web.

and from the paper itself...

A comparison can be made with the Cyc project [14]. Cyc, a project of the commercial venture Cycorp, tries to create artificial common sense. Cyc’s knowledge base consists of hundreds of microtheories and hundreds of thousands of terms, as well as over a million hand-crafted assertions written in a formal language called CycL [20]. CycL is an enhanced variety of first-order predicate logic. This knowledge base was created over the course of decades by paid human experts. It is therefore of extremely high quality. Google, on the other hand, is almost completely unstructured, and offers only a primitive query capability that is not nearly flexible enough to represent formal deduction. But what it lacks in expressiveness Google makes up for in size; Google has already indexed more than eight billion pages and shows no signs of slowing down.

Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School

Researchers Map The Sexual Network Of An Entire High School
COLUMBUS, Ohio – For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

testing ElementTree

Testing cElementTree...

from SimpleXMLTreeBuilder import *
import cElementTree as ElementTree

def xml2elem(xmlData):
p=TreeBuilder()
p.feed(xmlData)
return p.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
text = """ root content
tag 1 text
content of tag2
deeper
tag2 tail

"""
elem=xml2elem(text)
print 'elem.Tag->', elem.tag # elem root
print 'findall->', elem.findall('tag1')[0].text # tag1 text
print 'interrogate second child...'
print ' ', elem.getchildren()[1].tag # tag2
print ' ', elem.getchildren()[1].items() # [('id', '2'), ('att2', 'val2')]
print ' ', elem.getchildren()[1].getchildren()[0].tag # next level gets... deeper
print 'for child -> elems children but not grandchildren'
for child in elem:
print ' ', child.tag #tag1 tag2 (but not deeper)

file=open('text.xml','w'); file.write('text'); file.close

print 'for elem in iterparse -> all levels...'
for event, elem in ElementTree.iterparse('test.xml'):
print ' ', elem.tag # #tag1 tag2 AND deeper

---

elem.Tag-> root
findall-> tag 1 text
interrogate second child...
tag2
[('id', '2'), ('att2', 'val2')]
deeper
for child -> elems children but not grandchildren
tag1
tag2
for elem in iterparse -> all levels...
tag
deeper
tag2
root

Mary Ellen Bates - Tip of the Month

Mary Ellen Bates - Tip of the Month:
Good tips...
"...try Google's synonym search. Add a tilde (~) at the beginning of the words child and obese (~child ~obese), and Google retrieves web sites that use any of those synonyms."
Google Personalized
Personalized Google is still in beta, but it's an interesting tool. Once you go to the Google Labs page and select Personalized, you will be sent to a new search page, that includes a link to [Create Profile]. You can specify the type of searching you typically do, ranging from biotech and pharmaceuticals to dentistry to classical music. Click [Save Preferences], and then type your search terms in the Google Personalized search box.

---

At the search results screen, you will now see something new -- a slider bar that lets you specify how much you want the search results sorted by those interests you specified. The default is minimal personalization; move the slider bar toward maximum, and you will see the search results change on the fly, as Google re-ranks the results based on your personal interests.

---

Specialized Searches
In addition to the well-known Google search tabs for searching the web, news and images, there are several specialized search tools for commonly-search subjects, including UncleSam for searching federal government information; University Search for searching within the sites of major colleges or universities;

Simplicity

dirtSimple.org:

"In my second professional programming job, I had a really interesting boss. When we had a design meeting, we would all sit around a whiteboard, and as Roger (my boss) threw out things we needed to accomplish, the other programmers and I would propose solutions, and Roger would say, 'Really? What if you just did X?', where X was some absurdly, ridiculously, jaw-droppingly simple thing.

Of course, X wouldn't always work; oftentimes one of us would find a hole in his idea. We'd all then try to fix the hole, but at some point the idea started to become too complicated for Roger's taste. 'How about Y?' Still ridiculously simple, and tantalizingly close to working.

Oftentimes, he 'cheated', by redefining the problem itself to make it a simpler problem to solve, or forcing the problem to fit some existing available solution. We would continue in this vein until the solution was so simple it hardly seemed like any work to actually implement, or it became absolutely clear that the problem would not yield to simplicity. In which case we simply packed it in for the day on trying to solve that problem, and we'd hit it again on another day."

The article continues, wonderfully, in this vein. I don't know that I'm as good as his boss, but I certainly recognize myself. Its reassuring to find there are others out there ...

Roger, by the way, was not a programmer by trade. He was a teacher, mostly of learning disabled children.

infoSync World : Shake the Samsung SCH-310 to its senses

infoSync World : Shake the Samsung SCH-310 to its senses:

Airpen of the future?

"Samsung Electronics today unveiled the world's first mobile phone with built-in, 3-dimensional motion recognition technology. Dubbed the SCH-310, the handset calculates and ascertains movement in three dimensional space, and then carries out commands according to those calculations.

Samsung's new SCH-310
breaks new ground with
its 3D motion recognition
capabilities

Previously, several handset makers have shown prototypes drawing on motion recognition technology, however typically such concepts have relied on two-dimensional recognition rather than full spatial tracking. To enable the 3D motion recognition technology found in the SCH-310, Samsung devised a moving algorithm, resulting in applications for 22 domestic and foreign patents.

Predicting a future where 3D motion recognition technology will become an important user interface, Samsung envisions the technology revolutionizing mobile phone designs and doing away with the need for complex keypads on handsets, portable audio players, digital cameras and other handheld products. In particular, the company sees the technology changing mobile gaming.

The SCH-S310 relies entirely on 3D motion recognition technology for its user interface, enabling users to dial by 'writing' digits in the air. Shaking the phone twice will conclude a call or delete spam messages, whilst drawing the letters 'O' or 'X' will cause the handset to respond with 'yes' or 'no' voice messages. Also housing MP3 playback functionality, moving the phone sharply to the right will cause songs to skip forward; to the left, and it skips backward.
"

Schneier on Security: Physical Access Control

Very nice description of security logic applicable to software (not all that powerful for fences as commenters point out....

Schneier on Security: Physical Access Control: "In Los Angeles, the 'HOLLYWOOD' sign is protected by a fence and a locked gate. Because several different agencies need access to the sign for various purposes, the chain locking the gate is formed by several locks linked together. Each of the agencies has the key to its own lock, and not the key to any of the others. Of course, anyone who can open one of the locks can open the gate.

This is a nice example of a multiple-user access-control system. It's simple, and it works. You can also make it as complicated as you want, with different locks in parallel and in series."

ZDNet AnchorDesk: Why IM is so much better than e-mail

ZDNet AnchorDesk: Why IM is so much better than e-mail:

Curiously enough, multichat has none of these virtues.

"People I need to reach aren't responsive to e-mail anymore; they seem to check it every few hours or so, probably dreading the onslaught of spam and tedious threads that await them.

IM restores that rapid-fire pungency e-mail used to have, an electronic version of someone sticking their head in your office door.

I IM'd three of my IM peeps to find out why they like it.

Brian: Hey, I'm writing about IM in my next column. What's the essence of it?
Rafe Needleman (with his characteristically analytical take): presence is a key part of it. i know if you're there when i send a message to you. that's something you can't do either with e-mail or phone

Brian: OK, OK, I'll admit it, IM is cool But why?
Joni Blecher (with her usual larkish take): oh, easy--it's just like passing notes in class.

Brian: Brainstorming for my column: Why do you think IM is cool?
Stacy (my wife, as catty as a woman with five cats should be): you can be far more explicit than you can be on your work e-mail--i.e., bitching about your boss's awful new shoes w/o leaving a trace in the company's server logs. and one more a neat freak like you will appreciate: less crap to have to delete from your in- and out-box.

And this comment from a reader:

No latency
Its like a discussion, only you can't be interrupted.

And yet....

mod_pubsub

Why isn't this precisely what we need for Multichat?

mod_pubsub Project FAQ: "What is Repubsub?

Previous Mod-pubsub distributions (which are still available on Sourceforge) included a mod-perl server, a standalone Python server, client libraries in 10 programming languages, lots of sample code for the mod-perl server, random tools, badly-maintained docs, and the kitchen sink. However, we found that a large proportion of all the developers who wanted to use Mod-pubsub just wanted the Python server with the JavaScript client and were confused by the other stuff. So Repubsub is a minimal Mod-pubsub package comprised of the Python server and JavaScript client, rewritten for better performance and scalability.

Exactly how do Mod_pubsub's connections stay open?

Mod_pubsub's clients do not poll the server every so often. Instead, like Jabber, a Mod-pubsub server holds open the connection socket to its clients. The main difference between Mod_pubsub and Jabber is that we use standard HTTP as our wire format, whereas Jabber uses its own XML-based protocol. (Yes, we know that people think HTTP is a polling protocol... but it's not necessarily.)

Are there any other products like Mod_pubsub?

Similar projects include Pushlets, Jabber, and XMLHTTP. Unlike mod_pubsub, Pushlets can only maintain a few simultaneous connections, and require Java programming. With mod_pubsub, if you know how to use HTTP, you can do PubSub. Unlike Jabber, which uses its own XML-based protocol, we use standard HTTP. And Mod-pubsub is easier to work with, supports multiple users viewing the same data stream at the same moment, and is more flexible than XMLHTTP.
"

Form follows function. Architecture and technology follow form

Joel on Software - Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You: "Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like 'Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music' and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other's stories: 'Peer To Peer: Dead!'

The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: 'Can you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?'"

Blogger Help : All about Blogger's post editor

Blogger Help : All about Blogger's post editor: "All about Blogger's post editor"

Shirky: Situated Software

Shirky: Situated Software: "We've been killing conversations about software with 'That won't scale' for so long we've forgotten that scaling problems aren't inherently fatal. The N-squared problem is only a problem if N is large, and in social situations, N is usually not large. A reading group works better with 5 members than 15; a seminar works better with 15 than 25, much less 50, and so on.

This in turn gives software form-fit to a particular group a number of desirable characteristics -- it's cheaper and faster to build, has fewer issues of scalability, and likelier uptake by its target users. It also has several obvious downsides, including less likelihood of use outside its original environment, greater brittleness if it is later called on to handle larger groups, and a potentially shorter lifespan.
"

Oxfam America: Asian Earthquake & Tsunami

Oxfam America: Asian Earthquake & Tsunami

I just gave* to Oxfam, and put a link in Delicious. They seem to be in the forefront of aid to the region.

If you'd like to give as well, you can do so quickly and easily online. Just click on the link below:
http://www.oxfamamerica.org/whatwedo/emergencies/asian_floods_2004

* a pittance. 100,000 dead, 5 million in dire straits. A fraction of a penny per person.... But these things add up.

PubSub

PubSub: Testing PubSub

"Your subscription has been renamed.

It now appears in your Subscription Stack as Jon Schull's Weblog.

"

Multichat

Big day for me. With a lot of help from my friends I finally got Multichat working on my laptop, put up a wiki page (static image below, for posterity) in the new Lab For Social Computing describing the system , and set up a project page for the team. I really think we're on to something.

Multichat

Multichat is a real-time variation on Tony Chang's Webnote http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/ (i.e., in our variant you see what people are typing as they type).

I'm running it on my personal computer, so if I'm online, please check it out. Chat me at jonschullaim, and I'll give you a URL and show you around. If I'm not online, you can get a partial feel for it from this:

The project was initially inspired by the need for a cross-platform, type-as-you-talk, multi-person chat program optimized to facilitate face to face conversations between deaf and hearing students in the classroom. (see First in Class Deafness Project at RIT).

But (thanks to the webnote foundation and to collaborator/coder Mike Axelrod) it turns out to be far more powerful than that. It will eventually work as a peer to peer system supporting conversations between any number of connected users (with or without access to the internet).

Moreover, we think we know how use it to add real time social "presence" to websites. (This variation is inspired by John Cappiello's wikalong http://wikalong.phunnel.org/wiki/ and the mind-blowing "Just Letters" http://web.okaygo.co.uk/apps/letters/flashcom/) So imagine a sidebar or companion browser window that can be yoked to an arbitrary URL in the main window. "Let's meet at the New York Times website," you might say and once there you will not only be able to see what people have written before, you'll be able to see what they are talking about in real time. ("Gee, I wonder what they're chatting about at slashdot..." you wonder), and whoever is loitering on that"street corner" will be visible to you.

Multichat is coded in python on the server side and javascript
on the client side. By the time we're done we'll be doing some
interesting things with java and streaming content as well. If you'd like to play along, let me know!!! It's open source, and the whole point is to create a widely-used social software application that is incidentally a wonderful tool for Deaf<->Hearing communication.

Collaborators, co-designers, co-developers, and co-conspirators include

• the LSC's Chris Egert http://social.it.rit.edu/people/faculty/christopher_egert.php,
  
• NTID's Larry Quinsland with whom we will be doing usability tests
  
• Numerous students (including Qing Quan, Titiksha Agarwal, Brian Ijeoma)
  
• Your Ad Here
  

Adding Optional Static Typing to Python

Adding Optional Static Typing to Python: Guido van Rossum writes, "Python's parser generator is so lame, but that in turn is intentional -- it is so lame to prevent me from inventing syntax that is either hard to write a parser for or hard to disambiguate by human readers, who always come first in Python's design.)"

Human's first. What a concept.

User-Driven Software Development as Science

User-drive software development as science

I found this paragraph quite interesting as a case study (in usability rhetoric) I haven't looked at the product yet. [paragraph breaks and bolding added]

Is EasyOffice a Microsoft Office (or WordPerfect Office or StarOffice) 'clone'?

No. Although EasyOffice contains most features common to Microsoft Office, as well WordPerfect Office and StarOffice, it was designed and functions as an original, innovative product.E-Press Corp. has in place a rigorous scientific research and engineering development program. This program is partially funded by the Canadian Federal Government, and undergoes a comprehensive scientific and financial governmental audit each year.

In this research program, the 'scientific method' is followed: hypotheses are generated, data is tested, results are analyzed, and new hypotheses are then generated, and so on. What this means in the case of EasyOffice, is that a particular version of EasyOffice is created. Then experimental subjects (some with no computer experience, and others with varying amount of expertise) are asked to create a particular document, a particular spreadsheet and a particular presentation using the experimental version of EasyOffice. The steps subjects take to do so, the difficulties they have, and of course, their successes are noted. The hypotheses are then considered in light of these results, and a new set of hypotheses, essentially a new version of EasyOffice, is then generated, and the procedure repeats.

The current version of EasyOffice essentially reflects this experimental origin, rather than a 'cloning' of any particular office suite. The bimodal success rates we obtained from inexperienced versus experienced users, is reflected in the 'Easy' and the 'Advanced' modes present in most EasyOffice programs. Many features which EasyOffice has (and indeed, Microsoft Office lacks) are there because of our observations of our experimental subjects. By the same token, many features that seem to reflect a Microsoft origin, are there also, but only indirectly so, because of demand of our experimental subjects. Experienced computer users are so entrenched with the Microsoft Windows and Office paradigm, that this group will independently cause a Microsoft-like version to emerge. This group vehemently rejects new ways of doing operations, new ways of organizing functions, and so on. On the other hand, inexperienced users are more open to new ideas, and actually do much better with a non-Microsoft-like paradigm. The effect of WordPerfect Office, StarOffice, Linux, or any other operating system or office suite, is found to be negligible in our studies in influencing subjects' outcomes.

Despite the skewing of our results due to the habituation (brainwashing?) of users with the Windows and other Microsoft paradigms, we have nonetheless maintained our vision of creating an innovative, intelligent, friendly office suite. Features that look similar in Microsoft Office, and WordPerfect Office, and StarOffice, may look similar in EasyOffice, but in many cases, our features are enhanced with the properties that subjects were found to need during our experiments. For example, although our 'File Menu' has become similar to Microsoft Office (and the other office suites), our 'File Menu' is bloated into 'File1' and 'File2' menus. Our subjects, were terrified of losing data, and would perform operations that reflected this fear. The many backup systems present in our 'File' menus, for example, reflect these observations, and allow our users an easier-use experience.

As well, while like other office suites, many of our features are built upon a dumb infrastructure, we are in the process of replacing many of the dumb routines with AI routines. As our mission statement says, "...rather than being a block of iron and silicon sitting on one's desk, it will become one's friend, in every sense of the word. You will talk to it, and it will talk back to you. It will empathize with you. It will do what you ask of it", and as the AI routines become incorporated into our software, this will happen.EasyOffice is not a clone of Microsoft Office, nor is it "one more office suite on the market". We believe EasyOffice is very special because it does what you, the user, want it to do.

Harvard Gazette: Academic turns city into a social experiment

Harvard Gazette: Academic turns city into a social experiment
Fascinating article

"One of former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus' many inspired strategies for changing the mindset - and, eventually, the behavior - of the city's unruly inhabitants was the installation of traffic mimes on street corners. (Photo courtesy of El Tiempo)
"

DrPython

DrPython
Dare I hope that this is a straightforward, nice looking open source python editor with code folding, and no show-stopper bugs? I do dare hope.

"DrPython is a highly customizable, extensible editor/environment for developing programs written in the Python programming Language. It is implemented in wxPython.
(wxPython is a set of python bindings (and extra widgets) for wxWidgets).
It uses Scintilla for the Text Controls.
"

This picture turns out to be a hoax...

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Does Not Compute): "

Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a 'home computer' could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use and only
"

Google Suggest puts two people first

Google suggest
One letter queries to Google suggest bring up premiere guesses. Amazon is the top guess for "a". I tried all letters. Two people show up in the premier positions. Guess who.

Hint: one name begins with "P", the other with "T"
To see the answers, select the text from here...
Paris Hilton
Tara Reid (never heard of her!)
...to here

Technology Review: Portable Projectors

Technology Review: Portable Projectors
This article illustrates a dozen great ideas about a world covered with small cheap video projectors.

Build a tiny projector into each of those devices, though, and the world becomes your display. Raskar’s team has developed hardware and software that can project digital images onto whatever surface is handy—the wall, say, or a desktop—and make them look good even if the impromptu screen isn’t nice and smooth. And “once you buy into this notion that people would like to have this kind of an attachment,” he asks, “what will they do beyond just looking at those images?”

virtual scroll ring maps circular mouse motion into vertical scrolling.

Sounds like a great idea. Sounds like the iPod is casting a shadow....

Technology Review: Virtual Ring Eases Scrolling: "The virtual scroll ring maps circular finger, stylus, or mouse motion into vertical scrolling. Clockwise motion moves the scroll bar down and counterclockwise motion moves it up. Bigger circles and faster motion increase scrolling speed."

Energy Independence by 2014?

The right way to win.:

Could we make this a successful grass roots movement? Let the Republicans choose between becoming heroes or getting left behind?

"If President Bush is looking for a legacy, I have just the one for him - a national science project that would be our generation's moon shot: a crash science initiative for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in 10 years. Imagine if every American kid, in every school, were galvanized around such a vision. "

"If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, he would dry up revenue for terrorism; force Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to take the path of reform - which they will never do with $45-a-barrel oil - strengthen the dollar; and improve his own standing in Europe, by doing something huge to reduce global warming. He would also create a magnet to inspire young people to contribute to the war on terrorism and America's future by becoming scientists, engineers and mathematicians. "This is not just a win-win," said the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. "This is a win-win-win-win-win."

"Summoning all our energies and skills to produce a 21st-century fuel is George W. Bush's opportunity to be both Nixon to China and J.F.K. to the moon - in one move.
"
--Thomas Friedman

Croquet: Alan Kay's Next Big Thing

A first look at Croquet from Maxwell Borders:

"During a meal...I got the story of how Julian [Lombardi] had met up with so many other stars that formed the Croquet constellation: Alan Kay – an ex-Xerox PARC genius who’d developed the familiar “windowing” interface (GUI); 3D games and graphics wizard David Smith; David P. Reed, father of Reed’s Law (a scaling law for groupforming network architectures); Andreas Raab, a 3D prodigy and Squeak developer; and Mark P. McCahill, the guy who coined the phrase “surfing the Net,” among other things. By all appearances, Julian had gotten mixed up with the Dream Team of computer geeks. All that was left was for me to see what they had created.

We sat down before our respective laptops – I on my PC, he on his Mac, and we began to explore the environments of Croquet together. At first, the terrain was simple. A blue sky with clouds floating overhead. In this gridlike, 3D landscape, there were objects of various sizes placed in the foreground and back, all seemingly subject to the laws of perspective.

“I designed this area to look like the Holodeck,” he said. “This lets the user know he’s at a starting place.” Julian’s avatar – a white rabbit – approached, and Julian’s voice could be heard from one of the computer’s speakers.

“Hear my voice? That’s voice-over IP.”

He took me to one of the objects in the landscape. It looked to be a floating window or picture.

“Watch this,” said Julian and a beam of light shot from his avatar to land on the picture-window, representing his interaction with it. He moved the window back and forth as if it were spinning on an invisible axis. Then, on his computer, he gave it a spin and it turned. As I got closer to the picture-window, on my computer, I could see the image being presented – pillars of some classical civilization overgrown by vines.

“Why don’t you give it a try?” said Julian.

From my PC, I clicked on the window and suddenly I controlled it. I moved it as Julian had from his machine – pushing it from the left – forward then back – and the picture-window changed proportions as I moved it. Then something quite profound happened: Julian’s avatar stopped my movement. You could see the window jump slightly as we wrestled to gain control of the thing.

“What you are seeing now is at the essence of Croquet,”"

And here's a screenshot:

The caption reads...

As a result of the game's exposure in a Croquet space, it is possible for two or more people to collaboratively use an application over the network - even though the application was not written to support online interactivity. Its network awareness is a feature imparted to the application because of its exposure within a collabrative Croquet space.

ASPN : Python Cookbook : Easy string interpolation in Python 2.4

ASPN : Python Cookbook : Easy string interpolation in Python 2.4
A great new string interpolation recipe for python by Michael Simionato.
It's the little things...

language="Python"

def printmsg():

    opinion = "favorite"

    print interp("My $opinion language is $language.")

Discussion:

This is the way I always wanted string interpolation to work. 

Me too

Wired News: Genome Model Applied to Software

Wired News: Genome Model Applied to Software: "What does uncovering the secret language of DNA have in common with reverse-engineering Microsoft software?
"

Python and Mathematics (PyCon 2004)

Python and Mathematics (PyCon 2004):
An inspiring argument that computer science is the future of math education (and python shall lead the way).

"...geekdom has become a place to channel one's nationalism, altruism and idealism, somewhat outside the scope of traditional politics.


From the standpoint of a Buckminster Fuller enthusiast such as myself, the open source movement has many of the hallmarks of what he projected as a 'design science revolution,' which would be global and focused on actual artifacts over political rhetoric."

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur

TotallyUnrelatedQuotes - Grafitron Wiki: "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."
Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.