A System after the mess

Neal Stephenson: The System of the World (Volume Three of The Baroque Cycle)

The last of the three volumes in the Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, is both a detective story set in London in 1714 and a phantasy on the very early beginnings of the industrial age, where the natural philosophers leave their roots in alchemy and become real scientists. Isaac Newton and Gottfried von Leibnitz figure prominently here, with much rivalry but also some interesting philosophickal discussions, as do the personages from the earlier volumes, The Confusion and Quicksilver: Jack and Bob Shaftoe and various of their relatives, Eliza, Dappa, Van Hoek, Daniel Waterhouse, and the enigmatic Enoch Root.

The System seemed to me the most worked through of the three volumes – there are fewer digressions and meandering descriptions, the intrigue is tighter though perhaps more predictable. The language is less modern, the backdrop of old London interesting, and the research into the outline of the Tower of London or the details of justice metered and rendered is deep and more relevant than in the other volumes. I enjoyed The System the most of the three and found it the easiest to read.

Overall, there has been progression through the three volumes – somewhat unusual, though I wonder whether not sales have suffered because the Quicksilver was comparatively hard to get through, with more historic personages and less progression in the story. I like long books, philosophy of science, and enough magical realism (we never get an explanation for the denseness of the Solomonic Gold, for instance, as well as Enoch Root’s longevity – he shows up in Cryptonomicon, too) that you get a sense of the playfulness of the author.

Recommended – though some perseverance is necessary with the first volume. Have fun.

Finally – a reason to get a tablet PC

GE’s Imagination Cubed is just what you need to justify getting that cool tablet computer – after all, you are at an advantage when you need to outdraw your colleagues, wherever they may be.
Nifty tool, though, would be excellent to have running while having a phone conversation. Let me draw this for you…..
(via Kimberly Hatch, The Concours Group)

The Battle of Britain, from up high

Patrick Bishop’s Fighter Boys is a thorough history of the young fighter pilots who saved Britain during the Summer of 1940, at enormous personal cost. The book covers strategy, tactics, organization, individual dogfights as well as the aftermath of Fighter Command.
As a child, I read my father’s collection of Biggles books, and learned the difference between Hurricanes, Spitfires and Mosquitos, as children tend to do. This book gives the real story – and one of the things it taught me is that in the Biggles stories about the Battle of Britain, Captain W. E. Johns was authentic. The battle was fought by young men who saw it as a game, responding to the danger and the horrible injuries (primarily from burns, creating members of the Guinea Pig Club) with understated humour, but suffering badly in silence.

Excellent economics journal

Joseph Stiglitz, Brad DeLong and Aaron Edlin are among the people behind The Economists’ Voice, a new online journal, freely available as far as I can tell, in electronic format. I have only had time to glance at an article about the collapse of Enron, but given the quality of Brad’s blog, I trust this journal is a keeper.

Clayton does it again

Clayton Christensen has advised Microsoft to learn to love Linux, since it is a disruptive technology for the company – and that in order to break into the market, they should purchase RIM.

I agree in principle, but Microsoft has so much cash that they don’t really need to set up a company to kill their old business. But as I have said before, they are at the place where IBM was in 1988, making a lot of money and looking invinsible, but being annoying to many people with little money and little use for mainframes. And along came Bill Gates, with Windows 2.11 and cut-and-paste between Excel and Word.

Actually, I thought this would happen at the desktop, with Netscape (in 1995), or perhaps Google (next year) creating the net-centric application suite. But it seems we need to move to handhelds before this takes off, a market dominated by telephone operators and OEM producers, with tiny processors, shoddy cameras and customers willing to invest in inferior, low-margin technology to get portability.

So, we’ll see whether Bill Gates can do a Lou Gerstner operation – but odds are against it.

MT-Blacklist works

A brief look at my MT log shows that 76 attempts at blogspamming were stopped the last 24 hours. Of these, 4 (all with the same URL) made it through the filter and necessitated modification of the list.
So MT-Blacklist works. Time to step up and pay for it….
Two usage comments: There are some small errors with the software – it tends to abort if there are many comments or the server is slow, and the downloading and installation of the common list does not work for me, so I have developed my own. But I am not on the latest release, so that may have been fixed. Secondly, what works best are regexp strings with key words in them, most of the denials are for pretty obvious medication, pornography or card game terms.
One interesting exception: A spam comment with a link to Sun in it. An attempt to deliberately insert the URL into spam filters?

Dumb – and loud – objects

Bruce Sterling’s WIRED article on Dumbing down smart objects reminds me of a science fiction short story I read some years ago. I think it was called “A Captive Audience”, and it was possibly written by Ann Warren Griffith in 1953.

The story was that advertising had become embedded in tiny little sound generators, too small to locate and destroy, in all products. Breakfast was accompanied by the cereal boxes singing “Eat me!”, the sofa would bellow “I am soft and comfortable, why don’t you sit down?” and so on.

The key point was that you could not escape: Earplugs had been outlawed as an impediment to commerce and free speech. For some reason, given the current debate about DRM and the recording industry, this doesn’t seem so far out anymore….

Hunting for academics

My short essay on how to hunt down and capture professors was published last week in European Business Forum. This is a tongue-in-cheek article, but the topic itself is actually rather serious. One of the large differences between the United States and Europe is the tight links and mutual respect between business and academia in the USA – a relationship that lies behind much of the competitive advantage the USA enjoys in innovation-driven technology businesses. Yes, I know many US academics think business people are difficult to communicate with, and vice versa. But compared to the iron walls in Europe, US business and academe are bosom buddies.

Maybe I should write a similar essay on “how to bag a business person,” directed towards the professors….

Forget the name, just collaborate

Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield has an excellent point in his reflections on Disney’s use of collaborative software – essentially, don’t start it as a separate piece of software, just do it. In this case by sneaking in Newsgator in people’s email programs and not telling them that they really are using RSS feeds.

I can feel an acronym coming: Keep It So Simple Users Participate Thinking Only They Have Emailed Many – or KISSUPTOTHEM™.
You saw it here first. Email me for licensing, IP issues, and finder’s fees. Have buzzword, will travel….

Wikis in new contexts

(Via Joi Ito) Interesting posting on how the Wikipedia, as it matures both in content and access technology, needs to address issues of systemic bias. I am currently fiddling with using a wiki in a corporate research context, and have quickly found that the technology may be more limited than I thought – for instance, it may be problematic in situations where the content you want to produce is linear in nature and not easily can be split into bits that can be easily named (and CamelCased…..).
However, while the easy internal linking of a wiki may be less useful in a corporate project setting than the many-versioned editing capability. We’ll see how things go as the project progresses.
As for Wikipedia, the fact that its content reflects its creators is not really, to me, a big concern. Rather than impose different behavior on the creators, why not just get more contributors from populations outside the white, male, online, and educated classes? After all, an organization should reflect the complexity of its environment.

Brilliant data displays

Minard's map of Napoleon's March on MoscowMichael Friendly’s Gallery of Data Visualization contains a number of great data displays (and some not too good), including a link to an interesting page on versions of Minard’s map of Napoleon’s march on Moscow. Readers of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information will recognize much of what is here, but it was news to me that Florence Nightingale achieved at least some of her fame from her clever use of Coxcomb charts.
The site suffers from a few dead links, though. One of those that worked is the link to the CyberAtlas project. Enjoy!

Less confusion in The Confusion

Neal Stephenson: The Confusion (Volume Two of The Baroque Cycle)

I just finished The Confusion, the second volume of The Baroque Cycle (and it really is three books, you can’t start at volume two or three) and liked it much more than the first volume. Where the first volume was confusing in its storyline and a tiny little bit pretentious in its wealth of researched detail, the second volume is more lighthearted and readable. There is much more swashbuckling, centering on the picareque of Jack Shaftoe meandering through Asia and Latin America with a merry and eventually shrinking Cabal of conspirators, and a hint of the creation of a world-wide system of currencies and trade, with Eliza’s global financial machinations. But Stephenson has a problem with endings – like Norse sagas, his characters have a habit of suddenly disappearing.
Like Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, The Confusion suffers from not being able to get fully into style: The modernity of language and thought of the main characters as well as their frequent communications with each other decreases realism while speeding up the plot. I suspect Stephenson made a deliberate decision here – whether it is motivated by consideration for his tech-enabled audience or by a belief that people thought and acted very close to how we do today then doesn’t really matter.
The Confusion, much more than Quicksilver, was fun. It has an element of continuance, like the second of the Lord of the Rings movies, but also plenty of adventure, some humor, and a touch of magical realism. I liked it and have already ordered the last volume, The System of the World, which was published two days ago. Stay tuned.

Presenting with the Tablet PC

It always takes time to understand how to use a new technology – and my Tablet PC is no exception. I have tended to see the tablet facilites as a cool feature with limited use. But recently, I found a way to use it that takes advantages of the new features – partially inspired by John Seely Brown‘s “handwritten” Powerpoint slides.
Yesterday, I did a presentation at a Concours Summit at Gleneagles in Scotland. Like most presenters, I use Powerpoint from a laptop, and then use paper flipcharts to capture what the audience says and to facilitate interaction. That combination is not ideal: With electronic slides, you easily get bound to one particular sequence and pre-defined content, which is not very flexible. With paper flipcharts, you typically have to stand over on the side, with limited space for writing, and the audience, if large, can have problems seeing what you do. My idea was instead to use the Toshiba Tablet PC, with Windows Journal as an electronic flipchart. Aside from larger projection of what you are writing, it means you have captured the notes directly.
To make it work, I had to fiddle with some details:

  • when in tablet mode, the Toshiba has three programmable buttons available – and I set them to “arrow up” and “arrow down” (to flip Powerpoint slides) and the middle one to alt-ESC (to jump between Powerpoint and Journal). (Incidentally, I tried with alt-TAB, which is what I normally use to jump between applications, but Powerpoint will screw that up when in presentation mode)
  • set up Powerpoint in presentation mode, changing the cursor to a pen with some vivid color, such as red
  • get a lectern, so that the laptop is at a comfortable level for writing – you need to see the audience, not lean over your computer
  • set the screen to landscape mode, and pay attention to orientation, so that the picture does not end up upside down or sideways on the large screen
  • close down all other applications except Powerpoint and Journal
  • lock the on/off button to avoid accidentally hitting it and suddenly shutting down the computer
  • PRACTICE! (to make it look natural)
The main advantage of doing presentations this way is that you naturally (at least after a little practice) get into a more relaxed way of presenting, using the pen to circle details on the slides, and flipping over to Journal to capture notes and make drawings or diagrams to illustrate points that you don’t have in your presentation. A side benefit was that I could quickly tidy up the notes after the presentation, print them as a PDF file, and e-mail them.
The whole exercise worked well enough that I will do presentations that way in the future. It makes for a much livelier and more flexible presentation style, and can be a way to generate interaction with the audience. While the technology initially may get a little in the way, since it is unfamiliar to the audience, Journal and the tablet PC writing tools are sufficiently similar to paper writing that the “wow” effect quickly subsides.
And, of course, it looks cool. That’s not unimportant….

Risks of open forum disaster recovery

Dan Bricklin‘s elegant essay on the lessons for system design and use of on-line and other information sources (Learning From Accidents and a Terrorist Attack) is very informative and makes some excellent points around the ability and availability of the general public as a participant in disaster recovery. It nicely validates what every IT prophet has been saying, in one form or another, since the early 90s: Increases in communications and information processing capability will lead to more consumption of that resource, enabling organizations to quickly respond to outside changes – indeed of “spontaneous” organizations to quickly form to address issues. We communicate rather than plan, and can mobilize quickly. Dan makes some great points around what this means for systems and component design.
However, there is one problem with using open tools, such as RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and open conference calls: Their very openness makes them a path for a future terrorist. A group of terrorists wanting to do something akin to the 9/11 action could now learn from what happened then, and include a number of on-line participants with a role in spreading misinformation, increasing fear and diverting resources. There were instances of misinformation during 9/11 – I remember news items about a carful of bombs being stopped on some bridge in New York for instance – and the news channels normally apply some form of fact-checking. While the Wikipedia model works great when there is time – and people check changes against a contributor’s past behavior, I think we should be careful with too much openness in a time-pressured situation. Some form of validation needs to be in place, perhaps some form of peer-validation that draws on the public’s increased communications capability one wants to tap into in the first place.
(Also posted at RISKS Digest 23.52)

Atomic attacks and the origins of the Internet

Steve Fox’s request for IT myths made me remember something my students tell me whenever I talk about the beginning of the Internet: That it was designed to withstand an atomic attack (through redundancy and automatic rerouting.)
That is a myth which refuses to die – and it may be that the fact that Internet and messaging worked after the September 11, 2001 attacks may have something to do with it. Though Paul Baran mentioned this as a side effect in a paper on packet switching, it was not a factor in deciding on creating Arpanet – until someone came across Baran’s paper and created the myth years later. (Reference: Hafner, K. and M. Lyon (1996). Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.)
The main motivation for the Internet, according to the same source, was getting rid of the need for multiple terminals – that is, if you were using a remote machine via a telephone line, you had to have a dedicated terminal to it. Initially the hosts were going to interface directly, but for performance reasons, a dedicated subnet with PDP-8s was set up. BBN got the contract.
And the rest, as they say, is history. But I have to convince my students. Every year.

Excellent discussion of Wikipedia authority

Corante.com has a great summary of The Importance of… > The Great Wikipedia Authority Debate” href=”http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/005925.php”>The Great Wikipedia Authority Debate. I have used the Wikipedia as a student excercise and found that it requires quite a bit of setup, in terms of communicating values and norms, to work. I certainly do not believe in setting up a Slashdot-like reputation system, if that is what is being contemplated. Wikipedia works now, and will work in the future, just the way it is. Thinks I.

Painting the town wet

Printerbike

The note from Joi Ito’s web about the arrest of the organizer of something called Bikes Against Bush is interesting (aside from the fact that you can get arrested for being in NY with a bicycle nowadays.)

The technology of the dot-matrix printerbike is very cool, but isn’t it a little too complicated? I remember reading from one of Hemingway’s books about people walking around the streets of Paris with a rolling drum which would paint the word “Cinzano” on the sidewalk in water – which would, eventually, evaporate, hence no need to clean up at all.

This bike, ingenuity aside, strikes me as a high-tech answer to a low-tech problem. Still cool, though.

A new Agenda, this time for all of us

I followed Eirik Newth‘s recommendation and listened to the Gillmor Gang’s discussion of the ramifications of Microsoft’s announcement that Longhorn will be missing the WinFS file system when it comes out in 2006. Setting aside that this is further evidence that Microsoft has become 1980s IBM (including the practice of preemptive announcements and the time-honored “midlife kicker”), an interesting comment made by one of the particpants intrigued me: That Microsoft by having this delay may give away a large market to Google.
Despite having worked with computers for quite a while now, I still have problems getting used to what we can do with abundant processing, storage and communication. Google’s 1Gb Gmail, coupled with blogging/wikiing/blikiing technology and (still for a while) graphics processing at the desktop, can presumably mean a return to the mainframe topology – that is, all your apps and all your data can be on Google.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds – essentially, the problem of storage is not size of files, but duplication. I have hundreds of presentations, but probably also hundreds of copies of my favorite slides. A networked information format, with component-based information items linked together to form documents – across users, accounts, and organizations, could conceivably be stored on the 100,000 and counting servers that Google has. A very clean Wiki-based interface could be the preferred way to go for those of us who want deeply functional, simple software.
Many years ago, Lotus had a wonderful product called Agenda – text-based, freeform, lightning-fast (and, apparently, still available). The problem was unsupported file formats and limitations on content size – and the product eventually was abandoned in favor of the elephantine Lotus Notes. Imagine an Agenda-style software, stored in one place, with little duplication and a very simple interface. XML-based content, separation of content and display, sensible design choices and global search.
Well, one can dream, but I think this is getting a little closer to reality once we let go of the client-centric model of computing we seem to be clinging to. Fun.
Incidentally, I will listen more to the Gillmor Gang and the other stuff at ITconversations.com. Interesting stuff, picked up in a format that reminds me that all these bloggers and digerati out there are real people, available for a teleconference if only the topic and the audience is interesting enough.

The life digital and the life unexamined

I thought I was living digitally (wireless network at home, teleconferences and cellphones, blogging and wikiing and teaching electronically), but Joi Ito has a degree of connectivity that is couple of standard deviations further out.
In the end, he asks whether he is a freak, or whether this is the way people will work. I think he a bit on the edge, but less for his use of technology than for the disjointed way he works, jumping from one conversation to the other, because he can. In the end, more people will use the technology, but most people will not jump between conversations the way Joi does.
New technology will always be used first by those with the highest need for it. Joi Ito is a venture capitalist and a technologist – and as such, may need to talk to three groups of people as soon as he wakes up in the morning. The first users of a technology also shape its design – and the introduction of the ability to talk to many people fast means that more of us are going to talk to more people, fast.
The interesting thing, as far as I am concerned, is how we can use the technology in the slower lane. Realizing that increases in quantity and convenience is a quality in itself, how can the technology help us increase the quality of our conversations?