Author Archives: Espen

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About Espen

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Sort of simulated

This interesting article in the Economist shows how American politics is becoming increasingly polarized partially because when people move, they locate in areas with similar cultural preferences – be it granola or shotguns. When I lived in the States, I was always fascinated by the difference between Vermont (Birkenstock and yogurt country) and New Hampshire (main business: roadside hubcap emporiums). As it turns out, this split between liberal and conservative is happening all over the country, and you end up with the curious situation where the United States from the melting pot evolves into a salad, with rather few ingredients.

All this is interesting, but hardly relevant for technology, no? As a matter of fact, not: I am currently working on a research project with nGenera, called BST: Putting Business Simulation Technologies to Work. Simulation allows us to see the aggregate effect of many small decisions.

One of the early books showing the importance of this is Mitchell Resnick‘s Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. In this book, Resnick demonstrates a number of simulations programmed in StarLogo (a parallel version of Logo, a programming language originally created for children.)

One simulation in particular (caveat: this is from memory, my numbers may be wrong here) is pertinent to the polarization of America: The effect of weak preferences on clustering. Resnick constructs a 100 x 100 matrix where each cell is inhabited by either a black or white dot. Each dot can “think” (i.e., have preferences) for itself, and the simple preference each dot has is the unless it is living in a neighborhood with at least two of its own kind (“neighborhood” defined as the 8 cells sharing a side its own cell) it will move, randomly, to somewhere else. Note that this is not a strong preference: A dot of one kind will happily inhabit a cell where 6 of its neighbors are different, as long as two are the same. (A more thorough description, with images, is here.)

In a surprisingly short time, the initially well distributed matrix transforms into clear clusters (even bands) of white or black. Importantly, this process, when viewed from a distance, seem to be conscious, yet the relatively mild preference exhibited by each individual dot seems rather harmless. It may be tempting to ascribe the segregation to some conscious plot, failed policy or other single cause. It is a very powerful demonstration of the aggregate and cumulative effect of small decisions and weak preferences – and simulation is the only way to make it apparent.

Resnick’s book shows similar uses of simulations to understand ant foraging strategies and traffic jam formation – and some of the insights have been put into use in real life. For instance, traffic lights at on-ramps that introduces cars into traffic flow in an even stream rather than random groups is, as far as I know, a direct result of simulations of traffic jam formation.

In science, business and politics, we are moving from isolating single factors and varying them to understanding interaction patterns between many small components. Simulation allows us to understand this – the challenge lies in understanding where and how this very powerful tool can give insights.

And there you have Vermont and New Hampshire, Virginia and Maryland: The results of weak preferences over time. Perhaps we could simulate some real political discussion at some point?

Disrupted presentation at Open Nordic

Here (PDF) is my presentation from Open Nordic 2008.

My experience at this conference – the audience was interested and had good questions, by the way – was rather unnerving. As is my wont, I was sitting in the audience listening to the speaker before me, fiddling with my own presentation (I have found that starting for or against the previous speaker when you are late in the day in a conference helps the audience anchor what you are saying. Plus, sitting in on the previous speaker gives you an idea about what the audience wants.)

Anyway, I had saved my presentation, and when the other speaker had finished, I pulled out the power cable from my Lenovo X61 Tablet laptop to walk up and check that it would work with the projector.

And then my laptop just died. No sign of life, no reaction when cycling power, no reaction when taking out the battery, nothing. Dead as the proverbial doornail. My guess is a short in the motherboard or something like that – the newer Lenovos operate on a 90W power adapter and I have a feeling that they are pretty cramped in there, with more power running around than you would like.)

Foldershare logoWell, for once the backup system worked, as did everything else. Knut Yrvin put up his laptop (running Linux, incidentally), I logged on to my account at Foldershare.com, and lo and behold, the presentation which I had saved just minutes earlier was there in all its glory. Downloaded it to Knut’s’ laptop, opened it (in OpenOffice 2.4), and it ran like a charm.

Backup and interoperabilty, folks. It’s the new black.

I can’t recommend Foldershare highly enough. A life-saver. It can sometimes be tricky to install on some corporate networks, but boy, what a tool. Get it. It is free from Microsoft and, to quote Jerry Pournelle, It Just Works. Get It Now.

Now I just have to hope that my hard disk can be salvaged – while I have backup of my documents and email, there are some files and programs that for various reasons (mostly sloth on my part) were not backed up. As for getting a new laptop, that may take a week or two, but since summer is coming and I am mostly working from home anyway, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

SIm card as platform

I am at the Open Nordic Conference in Skien (about two hours south-west of Oslo), listening to Lars Ingvald Hoff from Telenor R&D talking to a bunch of developers about the new, platform-like SIM cards coming out.

The new SIM card has plenty of memory "gigbytes", USB interface (means you can get data from the SIM card real fast), virtual machines (or at least virtual memory areas, closed off, called SSDs). Tele operator has control of the card, application developers can install SSDs (whatever they are) that run in a sandbox. One business model may be that operators will charge rent for space on the SIM. Seems like a pretty full architecture to me. Translation HMTL to APDU (command language for phone) in a web server on the card, so in principle you could move your cell phone onto the net. Alos has a "Java Card", where you can to some extent can have interoperable applications running between manufacturers. Secure and certified environment, not full Java stack , but a pretty good selection. Standards based, not operator-specific.

FC: New short-range communications protocol, can be used to access payment terminals and similar, secure devices.

Apps can be downloaded and installed via a variety of protocols (among them BIP (Bearer Independent Protocol) directly to the SIM card.

In other words, mobile phones are going to open up to a much larger extent. I predict that the SIM card over time will become you – an identification and payment device.

Future future SIM card – you will get IP stacks, threads, full Java virtual machine, will look more and more like a server.

Open Mobile conference musings

Tomorrow I am giving a talk on disruptive technologies at the Open Nordic Conference, and how that theory applies to open standards and open source in the mobile technology industry. The audience is apparently very technical and I, quite frankly, do not think that open source plays that much of a role – apart from providing available functionality for innovators (mostly at the user interface/user service level) to build on.

The challenge in mobile technology (and in any consumer technology whose aim is to facilitate interaction) lies in establishing a platform for users and business to build on. Right now I am listening to Nick Vitalari analyze platform establishment and growth as part of the nGenera project PBG: Building a platform for business growth.

I am thinking about how platforms get established – and playing with words. It seems to me that the process can be described in terms of four words:

  • Problem (often personal): Somebody has an itch to scratch, something that can be fixed with software, so they do it. (This is what Eric Raymond considers to be the beginning of almost any open source project.)
  • Product (or service): The solution to the problem gets productized, either in a closed or open fashion, using standard or collaborative programming and development processes.
  • Platform: The solution expands both in scale (distribution) and scope (technologies it can run on, added services, links to other solutions) until it is less a solution in itself for others to build on, where customers and users get it less for itself than for the added functionality it provides.
  • Protocol: The platform becomes so open and ubiquitous that it is available everywhere, fading into the background in terms of user awareness. This can happen in many ways – it can expand to become all-encompassing (Google, for instance, maybe Facebook in certain communities, email certainly); it can be modularized with tools that pulverizes the proprietary value proposition (emulation, multiple clients (like Trillian in the chat space, cross-licensing); it can be regulated into a standard (AT&T with telephones, for instance); or it can be subsumed into an underlying functional layer (Microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy).

In the end, it will be forced into some form of openness.

Half-baked so far, but it’s a start.

Will the real security please stand up?

Peter Cochrane has it right – our preceptions of security and risk are way off. The single most dangerous thing I am doing today is probably driving my daughter to school. The most dangerous part of an airplane trip is driving to the airport. And the biggest security threat to your infrastructure is the employee who inadvertently posts your marketing plan on a world-readable wiki or stores his password on a Post-It note under the keyboard.

Michael Pollan says something of the same in In defense of food – that low-fat diets cause you to eat processed food and trans-fats, which are unhealthy. Instead, you should eat fresh, varied and pleasing food.

In other words, use common sense, taste buds, and simple mathematics.

Trouble is, that approach is hard to productize and market…..

Shared blindness

Ben Elton: Blind Faith, 2007

Ben Elton describes a society where reason is not allowed – where everything is based on faith and feeling, where everybody has to share what they are doing, where everything is ostensibly permitted, even encouraged, where everyone is famous. By law.

This world is a Web 2.0 version of 1984, nightmarish in its shallowness. Elton manages to make it both scary and believable – aside from the the inevitable screw-ups when it comes to technology (the hero creates some software that is decidedly primitive given real search-engines’ capabilities for sentiment analysis and finding links between information items.

Recommended.

The last days of eBay

Interesting article in the London Review of Books by Thomas Jones. I always thought eBay’s competitive advantage (aside from the obvious network effects) lay in its payment system (i.e., PayPal). But proprietary platforms will over time be out-competed by open and modular ones – about time selling something vent from platform to protocol.

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The importance of failure and the value of photographic evidence

J. K. Rowling does a great commencement speech at Harvard.

retrogoogling

Here is goosh.org, a UNIX-like interface to Google. I like it – wonderful how a sparse interface can improve productivity. It is almost so I start to long back to the days of Desqview and all those other text-based multitasking hacks of the 90s. (Mind you, this is just an interface, no full Unix shell.)

(Via David Weinberger.)

The Pigs Ate the Sausage

Tom Evslin quotes Andy Kessler on the explanation for why Bear Stearns collapsed: The Pigs Ate the Sausage.

Shows the usefulness of a lively (and entertaining) metaphor.

Mass Digitization: Time to fund it properly

The always readable Dan Cohen discusses funding for digitization of public domain books. Hard not to agree – I think Harvard-Yale-Princeton (or, for that matter, Harvard alone) should just pony up the money and do it. The resulting archive would be a boon to humanities research and researchers all over the world, would yield immense dividends in the form of research and study activity for decades, and would give Harvard a signal project like that courseware project down the river, especially given the recent kvetching about the size of the Harvard endowment and the lack of visible largesse on the expense side.

Signatures by fax, and security in context

(this is a work in progress, thought I would write this in public and see what reactions I get)

Bruce Schneier, the world’s leading authority on security, writes well about why we accept signatures by fax – noting that it works because it is done in context, everyone understands how insecure it is (except in the relatively rare instances when they don’t.) One thing is that we tend to think of new technologies in terms of old technologies: The physical signature can easily be faked with a fax, even easier when we start to use scanned PDFs – in fact, gluing in a copied signature becomes the standard way of doing things for most people.

I am currently thinking about security in a next-generation employee computing setup, where corporate infrastructure has retreated behind a browser and the end user can buy whatever he or she desires – be it a Mac or PC, laptop or desktop, cell phone or public terminal. Every user comes in via the public Internet, even if he or she is physically sitting right next to the server park.

From a security standpoint, this is actually a simplification, much as you simplify PC provisioning when you switch everyone to a laptop. Sure, many of the users don’t need a laptop, and a laptop is more expensive than a desktop. But differentiation has its costs, too. And it is much easier to make a desktop out of a laptop – in essence, all you need to do is sit still – than it is to to do it the other way.

If you move to an architecture with corporate infrastructure and personal, private terminals, you remove the inside-or-outside-the-moat distinction companies often naively use as their main security barrier. Instead you must verify everyone’s identity in terms of the information and functionality they can have access to. You need to specify this as a very granular level, and will need a well defined hierarchy of access rules. You will also, like Wikipedia, need to have a way to track who has done what where, and make it easy to reverse whatever changes has been done, should it prove necessary.

I am less certain that you need much of a standard for what should run on the clients themselves – surely we have progressed to a point now (or will in the near future) where end users can take responsibility for keeping their own technology’s reasonably updated and secure? We probably need to rethink security in terms of consequence management, in the sense that we need to make the consequences of poor security become apparent to the end user. The analogy is to car safety – for all the nagging about putting on your seatbelt and monitoring speeding, nothing would reduce deaths in traffic as much as a mandatory large spike sticking out of the steering wheel, instantly impaling the driver should he or she crash or suddenly brake.

(and that is as far as I got before the telephone started chiming, and it was time to scoot off for meetings and other things that eat up your day. I will be back. Comments, of course, are most welcome.)

Scarce Resources in Computing

New essay in ACM Ubiquity: Scarce Resources in Computing, about how we adapt our use and organization of information technology around what at any point is the scarce resource.

Comments welcome!

The Wired Beauty of Bridges

I don’t normally like collections of pictures with commentary, but this Wired collection of beautiful Bridges provided a nice break.

Thinking about warfare, the last 100 years

Martin van Creveld: The Changing Face of War: Combat from the Marne to Iraq , Presidio 2008

Martin van Creveld gained fame for The Transformation of War, a book that should have been read by the USA before venturing into Iraq (see previous review). In this surprisingly succinct volume, he summarizes the changes in thinking about warfare "from Marne to Iraq", showing how war has changed from something conducted in a short and contained spurts by an army via the "total war" first voiced by Ludendorff to today’s prolonged insurgencies, where the perpetrators blend back into the general population and advanced weapons fired from afar only can make the situation worse.

(As a digression, he characterizes the German invasion of Norway as rather risky and badly planned – it worked largely because the Norwegians were unbelievably unprepared.)

van Creveld divides war into two main phases: Before and after the atom bomb. After the atom bomb, total war was no longer possible, since it would mean mutual destruction. Instead, war has (for the most part) become guerilla war, where a militarily equipped power is battling a much weaker enemy, and, because the enemy is weak, become weak themselves.

There is almost no instances military powers successfully fighting insurgents – though since the history of fighting insurgencies are largely written by the losers, who argue that they could have won if not hindered by politicians, the press or lack of resources.

To fight an insurgency, the power in question must be legal, i.e., treat the insurgency like a criminal activity rather than a war (much as the British did in Northern Ireland, where they, incidentally, had a local police force and spoke the language.) Either that (which takes a lot of patience) or they must use cruelly applied force, with openness and without apology (as Hafez Assad did in Syria.) Trying to fight the war from a distance leads to a quagmire, but going in to fight the insurgents with their own means leads to losses and loses the war on the home front.

The book is admirably succinct when it describes the evolution in thinking about warfare up to about 1950 (showing, among other things, the increasing use of the scientific method in weapons and, to a lesser extent, tactics evolution.) It gets a bit repetitive on the question of how to fight insurgency. But the verdict on the US’ fight in Iraq leaves no doubts about what the author thinks about the technical "revolution in warfare" and what it does:

Once the main units of the Iraqi army had been defeated and dispersed, most of the sensors, data links, and computers that did so much to aid in the American victory proved all but useless. In part, this was because they had been designed to pick up the "signatures" of machines, not people. But it was also because these sensors did not function very well in the densely inhabited, extremely complex environments where the insurgents operated. Myriad methods could be used to neutralize or mislead whatever sensors did work. Worst of all, sensors are unable to penetrate people’s minds. As a result, almost four years after the war had started, the American troops still had no idea who was fighting them: Ba’athists or common criminals, foreign terrorists or devout believers. […]

Soaking up almost $450 billion a year, the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen was vainly trying to combat twenty to thirty thousand insurgents. Its ultramodern sensors, sophisticated communications links, and acres of computers could not prevent its opponents from operating where they wanted, when they wanted, and as they wanted; […] To recall the well-known, Vietnam-era song: When will they ever learn? (Ch. 6.5)

van Creveld offers few conclusions, aside from patience, people on the ground and good intelligence, all of which are hard to acquire and maintain. Otherwise, the insurgents will eventually win, if only because the military powers’ only way of winning is not participating.

Formula for spying

Mark Seal has a great article in Wired about how McLaren got hold of Ferrari’s designs and the twists and turns that followed.

What blows my mind is the size of the budgets these guys are willing to throw away. A company like McLaren spends a lot of money and develops technology that eventually goes into production cars (at least, that’s the theory), but with the hundreds of millions spent here, how can anyone recuperate it? Ferrari, at least, has a brand of car to sell, McLaren cooperates with Mercedes, but it still looks like rich man’s game to me.

Anyway, an entertaining story, showing that you better treat your employees right (how could Ferrari management not react before their chief mechanic had spilled the beans?) and do your own scanning if you are hoping to avoid betrayal or getting caught betraying.

Great business cards

42 Awesome Business Card Designs (With Links to 100s More)

I liked the secondhand store card as well. And Kevin Mitnick’s, though his exploits before going legit were rather reprehensible.

(Via Tyler Cowen.)

From Concours to BSG Alliance to nGenera

As can be seen from this press release, BSG Alliance (and all subsidiaries) has changed its name to nGenera Corporation. BSG Alliance acquired Concours Group last year, as well as New Paradigm and various, more technology-based companies such as Iconixx. The name nGenera represents a consolidation of the various acquired companies and signals a focus on the "next generation enterprise" – companies that use collaborative and Internet technology as an internal, native and natural arena for innovation and growth.

Consulting companies are fascinating – forever splitting and forming, driven by changes in content, business conditions and (to a rather large extent) by people chemistry. Though companies may change, the people very often remain the same – in a sense, even if you leave, you never really leave, but keep in touch (and use each other, if need be.) Modern technology underscores this sense of a cloud of people that know about each other and draw on each other when necessary, clustering around companies and ideas as need and economics dictate.

I started working in research-based consulting with Index, which was acquired by CSC, in 1994. I then moved on to work with Concours (which was formed by ex-CSC Index people plus some of their friends.) That relationship has lasted since 1999, and now it is time for nGenera, with an increased focus on collaboration technology (both in theory and practice) and an emphasis on what the future will be as well as how we will get there.

Stay tuned – a company that spans from Wikinomics to simulation technology promises exciting ideas and much to learn, while keeping a basis of solid IT management models and practices and a deep knowledge in talent acquisition and development. Stay tuned.

Splommentary irritations

Susan shows how PR agents have cottoned on to the value of blogs and linking, and started leaving not quite subtle enough product plugs in comment fields. To he it looks like Ms. Rosenberg is nothing more than a manual version of the botnets that every day leaves 4000 comments into my blog filter, most of them either gibberish or "Good site. Thanks." I want to preserve the ability to have people comment without signing in, but that requires tuning spam filters and doing a quick scan through the 4000 pieces of crap looking for false positives.

The answer to spam messages and comments is, in the long run, not filtering, but following the money and boycotting the companies that pays for them. I have had to turn off Track-Backs, a very useful feature, from my blog, because of spambots. That means I have not direct knowledge of who links to me, something I would like to know. (Yes, I can find this out in Technorati or Google, but I have better things to do.)

As for manual comment creeps, Chris Anderson solved his problem (300 emails per day, many of them from PR folks who didn’t bother to check that he would actually be interested) by blocking them all and publishing his block-file. An action that resulted in furious discussion and, eventually, an admission that Wired was kind of doing the same thing, with paper inserts in their magazines.

The thing is, I don’t mind product plugs. I love Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools (get the RSS feed, about one per day) and Amazon’s sometimes-brilliant recommendations. And if someone posts a note about an interesting piece of software that addresses something I have complained about, that’s great.

The Rosenberg approach is different, in that it attempts to write something pertinent to the blog post and then turn the conversation over onto the product plugged. If this person had been a real PR person, he or she would have found blog posts where MS Office is the relevant answer. That they are few and far between, does not mean that they do not exist – and if she could have found them, she would be a real PR person. Instead, her illiteracy and bad judgment is displayed for all to see.

It is to be hoped that Microsoft realizes the bad judgment they have displayed in hiring her and activate their filtering procedure.