Remembering the Future

One of those AHA moments (hope this doesn't turn out to be too embarrassing)

2011-11-12T20:10:00.001-05:00

Entropy, information and evolution Entropy and information Entropy and information both attempt to take the qualitative concepts of variety and constraint and provide a quantitative measure, using mathematical concepts. Thermodynamic entropy has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, and a unit of joules per kelvin (J/K). In information theory, entropy and information are measured in

A Social Media Brand Primer

2011-09-12T08:48:00.000-05:00

Hanselman Human behavior governs the system, the tools only magnify and accelerator the results. Is your social media expert telling you how the tools work and showing your what buttons to click, or are they talking about the larger picture?

Code Contracts to autogenerate test cases

2010-07-18T07:58:00.004-05:00

Jörg W Mittag If you want to know what Bertrand Meyer, the inventor of Design by Contract, thinks about combining TDD and DbC, there is a nice paper by his group, called Contract-Driven Design = Test-Driven Development - Writing Test Cases. The basic premise is that contracts provide an abstract representation of all possible cases, whereas test cases only test specific cases. Therefore, a

MetaModeling System

2010-07-06T07:31:00.002-05:00

Elastic Modeling Languages Declarative models are useful ways to drive complexity out of IT application design and configuration, in favor of more concise statements of intent. Given a declaration of preferences or constraints, an IT management system can compose multiple models together much more effectively than if the models were predominantly procedural, and also formally verify for conflicts

Process programming for evolving state

2010-07-05T13:32:00.003-05:00

What if you could backtrack (prolog) through a collection of processes (workflow) to evolve the state of a system (ets) where truth was replaced by satisfying the process contract pre-conditions and post-conditions (code contracts). A process is a function that transforms state from time t to t+1. Topics: evolutionary | programing | workflow

Cilantro Lime Rum Cooler

2010-05-21T12:32:00.002-05:00

Rafah Here is the Cilantro recipe. Only change I make is that I blend the ice with the first blend. OK, 2 changes. I don't blend it the second time, I just hand mix it. The second time you blend it, it makes a lot of froth probably because of the lime juice. I also do the entire Cilantro stick, not just the leaves and I do 2 batches with the same cilantro leaves and I mix the 2 batches, why

HTML5 and the [mobile] Web

2010-05-11T11:08:00.003-05:00

via Tim Bray What’s the best thing that could happen? Some widely-interoperable dialect of HTML5 becomes broadly usable quicker than expected, and we get decent tooling around it quicker than expected, and the nature of the devices evolves slowly enough so as not to outpace heavyweight browser technology. In this world, software user experience is on average better and development cost is on

New Measure of Human Brain Processing Speed

2009-08-27T09:11:00.003-05:00

via Nat Torkington [The brain is] clocked at 60 bits/second, according to this MIT Technology Review article. Their approach eventually led to Hick's Law, one of the few laws of experimental psychology. It states that the time it takes to make a choice is linearly related to the entropy of the possible alternatives. The results from various reaction-time experiments seem to show that this is

Does "Linked Data" have to be RDF

2009-08-06T13:35:00.001-05:00

Rob Styles Ian is saying a spreadsheet isn’t Linked Data, even if it’s on the web and even if it’s linked to. The only standard for describing how one resource relates to others using URIs is RDF. Sure, you can put URIs into a spreadsheet, but there is no standard interpretation of what the sheets, rows and columns mean. Topics: RDF | LinkedData

Philosophy, Science, Sociology and ID

2009-08-06T07:52:00.002-05:00

Francis Williamson Even within an immanent teleological schema of the Aristotelean sort there are going to be things best explained as the result of regularities in nature (efficient causes), such as the tides of the sea or the orbits of the planets, whilst others are best explained by reference to actual mental states (desires/intentions/goals/plans) of agents, such as my writing these very

Session Attacks and ASP.NET

2009-06-25T07:10:00.002-05:00

SANS If the attacker can fixate, hijack, or steal a Session from the victim, this type of attack will succeed no matter if the web site uses Forms Authentication, Windows Authentication, Client Certificates, etc. It doesn’t matter. As long as the attacker also has an account in the system as well as the victim’s Session ID, they can take over the session…that is unless the developer adds some

Data vs. Model Driven Programming

2009-06-12T09:13:00.001-05:00

MSDN But whereas the phrase “data-driven” implies the use of data as the driving mechanism, a model-driven application is one in which the data is exposed and consumed as models, highly structured, interoperable data. Furthermore, while we often described the use to which data is put with the words “application state” data or “metadata,” in truth data is data. Application and state data (as well

Big Data and the problem of metadata

2009-05-19T09:11:00.003-05:00

Jon via Michael E. Driscoll The meta-data problem is enormous. Say you’ve got a field called “diagnosis date” for some disease. It’s in a database with a date type, so there’s no format issue. What exactly does that date mean? First appointment with a family doctor? First appointment with a specialist? Is it self-reported? Has the date always meant the same thing, or did the meaning of the

Open Data Defined

2009-03-09T11:14:00.003-05:00

Open Government Data project Open Government Data Principles Government data shall be considered open if they are made public in a way that complies with the principles below: 1. Complete All public data are made available. Public data are data that are not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations. 2. Primary Data are collected at the source, with the finest possible

Build Metadata-Based Applications With The “Oslo” Platform

2009-01-26T21:18:00.002-05:00

Chris Sells In fact, .aspx files aren't too useful without ASP.NET, and XOML files without WF would be much less compelling. There are a number of runtimes and services being developed that will take advantage of "Oslo." These include a new version of ASP.NET supporting the MWeb Domain Specific Language (DSL) and the "Quadrant" Web editor, the "Dublin" Windows Server extensions supporting the "

The new workflow

2009-01-09T09:08:00.002-05:00

Jon Udell on how Ward Cunningham implemented Brian Marick’s notion of Visible Workings This isn’t just an innovative approach to software testing and workflow visualization. It’s also a radical statement about business process transparency. For most of us, most of the time, business systems are black boxes whose internal workings we can only discern in the outcomes of our (often painful)

Forced marriages not a community building strategy

2008-11-25T08:32:00.001-05:00

Inge Henriksen I won't try to analyze the community to much, but I think making services like "TM Snippets" and my Subject Layer forums etc is the right way to go. Why? Many companies has, often as part of their business strategy, tried to forcefully create communities and failed. The community services that are successful are, in my experience, most often created by people not asking "what is in

Unconscious thought and creative solutions

2008-09-25T08:55:00.000-05:00

Chen-Bo Zhong there is no doubt that unconscious processes may be most active during sleep but they can also be active while people consciously focus on something—just not the problem you hope to resolve. In our study, we manipulated unconscious thought by distracting participants from the task at hand and focusing them on a different, very cognitive demanding task. Thus, to harness the benefits

The mismatch between human-driven and machine-driven processes

2008-09-16T08:48:00.000-05:00

Andrea Westernein This is the subject of a book (written in 2005) by Keith Harrison-Broninski, Human Interactions, The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management. The information is also overviewed in a paper by Harrison-Broninski at http://human-interaction-management.info/A%20Role-Based%20Approach%20To%20Business%20Process%20Management.doc. The paper and book describes the mismatch between

RDF and Data 2.0

2008-08-25T09:52:00.001-05:00

I have been talking to my friend Bryan Thompson after he got back from his talk at OSCON Cloud Computing with bigdata, and it got me thinking again about RDF data storage, which seems to be getting increasing mindshare lately. Bryans point is that his approach to RDF provides a next generation data model that generalizes all the Google Big Table clones, like Cassandra or HBase that are

Zebra's Stripes, Butterfly's Wings: How Do Biological Patterns Emerge?

2008-08-10T08:57:00.000-05:00

ScienceDaily “Pattern formation is a classic problem in embryology,” says Denise Montell, Ph.D., a professor of biological chemistry at Hopkins. “At some point, cells in an embryo must separate into those that will become heart cells, liver cells, blood cells and so on. Although this has been studied for years, there is still a lot we don’t understand.” . . . By making certain assumptions about

Web 2.0 Business Models

2008-07-24T08:30:00.002-05:00

Value can be created by the exchange of goods that resolve a twist in the fabric of values. If I have something that you value more, and you have something that I value more, if we make an exchange, we unwind a twist in value space and bring the system back to equilibrium where we each have what we value most. Efficiency is possible by cutting out the middleman in this exchange process. I

Metcalfe, Einstein, and Linked Data

2008-07-21T12:30:00.000-05:00

Kingsley Uyi Idehen By simply injecting "Context" which is what a high fidelity linked data mesh facilitates i.e. a mesh of weighted links endowed with specifically typed links (as opposed to a single ambiguous type unspecific link), you end up with an even more insight into the power of a Linked Data Web. Topics: data2.0 | RDF

ENGINEERS' DREAMS

2008-07-17T07:26:00.000-05:00

By George Dyson Ed was reminded of cybernetician W. Ross Ashby's "Law of Requisite Variety": that any effective control system has to be as complex as the system it controls. This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be

Symmetry and Time

2008-06-27T10:13:00.000-05:00

Entropy There is no problem of “the arrow of time”. There simply is no arrow of time, as if time could go one “way” rather than another. That metaphor is an unfortunate result of spatializing time. The picture of time as a line along which one might travel in one direction or the other is a conceptual disaster. Time is becoming. Becoming is change. The undoing of a change is also a change. There

Modeling: More with less

2008-05-05T14:27:00.000-05:00

Discipline and punishment The practical result of such an approach (as anybody who's ever spent too much time with a UML design tool will attest) is an explosion of types and relationships that taken together in all its immensity actually provides very little insight into the problem at hand. The final model isn't any simpler than the original problem and so it's worse-than-useless; newcomers

The Bandwidth of Code

2008-04-29T10:15:00.001-05:00

Discipline and punish Hell is Other People's Code is, perhaps, another way of saying that code is a terrible way to communicate with other human beings. Foreign code inspires a mixture of apprehension, anger and anxiety precisely because the bandwidth capacity of written code is so horrifying small. Enormous amounts of context, nuance, philosophy, history -- in short, knowledge -- is lost forever

Limitations of a scientific theory of human consciousness

2008-04-29T07:46:00.000-05:00

BioEssays by Alfred Gierer via MikeGene We appear in our own memories, fears and hopes, desires and plans—as we are, or as we believe ourselves to be, or as we wish to be seen by others, as we want or do not want ourselves to become and as we see our past, and our future possibilities. Behavioral dispositions are influenced by these ‘‘self-images’’, which of course do not represent concrete

Code as consensus

2008-04-14T11:09:00.000-05:00

discipline and punish It's communication that seems to be the essential ingredient of all the different phases and levels and spheres of software engineering. Product managers have to communicate requirements to the developers, architects have to communicate abstractions to the developers, developers have to communicate code to each other, and sales has to communicate needs to the customers.

The Luminous Ground

2008-04-09T20:15:00.004-05:00

Christopher Alexander These 15 properties, were at the beginning, the underpinnings of the whole theory. Later, I realized that these properties were not the most fundamental aspect of the theory, and that they occur as consequences of an even more fundamental structure -- the system of living centers, and are simply the ways that centers support each other to create more life. ... Later the

Maintainable Architecture

2008-03-31T14:21:00.001-05:00

discipline and punish If maintenance costs are what determines project success or failure, if in fact the problem is change then, naturally, anything that can be done to reduce maintenance costs is a good idea. And here's where things start to get interesting, here's where software development becomes more than a hobby or craft. Most anybody, given enough time, can write a program to do 'X' but

Devices of the Soul

2008-03-07T09:59:00.000-05:00

Steve Talbott Our primary task is to discover the potentials within ourselves that are not merely mechanical, not merely automatic, not reducible to computation, Topics: philosopy | duality

Design Beyond Human Abilities

2008-01-28T16:37:00.000-05:00

Richard P. Gabriel Now I’ll turn my attention to some work by Adrian Thompson to see how we can approach designing ULS [ultra-large-system] systems. He defines three of what I call MetaDesign Spaces. A metadesign space is an approach to how to design based on what is known at what points in the design process. Pictorially, I depict a design as a blueprint, and from the blueprint, a builder can

Math model of asymmetric distribution of cell membrane proteins

2007-12-26T08:26:00.000-05:00

Roland Wedlich-Söldner To establish an asymmetric distribution of membrane proteins, diffusion has to be countered for a long enough time to allow the molecules to accumulate and fulfill their functions. This is possible through active and directed transport whose net effects need to outdo diffusion till the necessary concentration of molecules is reached. ... Apart from diffusion which prevents

Linear and non-linear learning

2007-12-14T08:57:00.000-05:00

Ken Carroll The internet is changing the way we learn and that’s because of its network qualities. I believe we’ve moved beyond the Mechanical Age, and beyond the Information Age, to the Age of Networks, and therefore to the Age of Networked Learning. Networks are every where and, as Jay Cross persuasively argues, they are changing everything, including how we learn. The last time that happened

Long tail business model dangers

2007-11-29T08:50:00.000-05:00

Read/Write Web You can make money on the long tail but not in the long tail. The precise point of Anderson's argument is that it is a collective of the long tail amounts to substantial dollars because the volume is there. The retail/advertising game is a game based on volume. You make money on a lot of traffic to a single popular site or the sum of smaller amounts of traffic to many less popular

What would you ask Tim Berners-Lee?

2007-11-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

Mine RDF seems to be so general that it can be considered for any application. The flip side of this argument is that for any specific application, it is the least powerful solution. That lack of power expresses itself as a more complex representation than is necessary for a specific solution, and an extremely weak inference capability, compared to an application specific model using a

Bioclocks work by controlling chromosome coiling

2007-11-22T09:26:00.000-05:00

Carl Johnson In recent years, scientists have discovered that biological clocks help organize a dizzying array of biochemical processes in the body. Despite a number of hypotheses, exactly how the microscopic pacemakers in every cell in the body exert such a widespread influence has remained a mystery. < p/> Now, a new study provides direct evidence that biological clocks can influence the

Programming, creativity and constraints

2007-11-05T14:00:00.000-05:00

discipline and punish The real problem, I think, is that the timeless, traditional understanding of programming is pretty much completely backwards. Everybody is taught that programming is a kind of writing where the goal is to use a special "language" to tell a computer what to do. From the beginning we are led to believe in this idealistic notion that programming is just a matter of developing

The fairytale of search as mechanical intelligence

2007-10-26T09:16:00.000-05:00

Alex Smith, a undergraduate electrical engineering student at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, has proven that a primitive type of computer known as a 2,3 Turing machine can solve every computational problem there is. Stephen Wolfram We don't have to carefully build things up with engineering. We can just go out and search in the computational universe, and find things like

Everything is Not Miscellaneous (The Importance of Structure)

2007-10-24T18:40:00.000-05:00

buko obele So rather than gleefully celebrating the removal of "physical constraints" on the web we ought to be searching for ways to better translate those same physical constraints (whose only fault is that they are old but have actually proved quite useful in many previous ventures including the construction of civilization) to the web. Better ways for users to add and organize data into

Gödel and the mathematics of life

2007-10-01T08:46:00.000-05:00

Albert Voie Life expresses both function and sign systems. This parallels the logically necessary symbolic self-referring structure in self-reproducing systems. Due to the abstract character of function and sign systems, life is not a subsystem of natural laws. This suggests that our reason is limited in respect to solving the problem of the origin of life and that we are left accepting life as

Incentives for creating Metadata

2007-09-19T08:22:00.000-05:00

Bob DuCharme Who assigns this metadata, and why do they do it? You have three choices: people who do it because they're paid to, people who do it because they want to, and automated processes. . . . While some metadata is free, such as the size of a file and the last time it was edited, creation of new metadata is never completely free. If you're not paying people outright, you must come up

Source of Memory Unknown

2007-09-07T11:30:00.000-05:00

Yasser Roudi*, Peter E. Latham A critical component of cognition is memory—the ability to store information, and to readily retrieve it on cue. Existing models postulate that recalled items are represented by self-sustained activity; that is, they are represented by activity that can exist in the absence of input. These models, however, are incomplete, in the sense that they do not explain two

The fairytale of N-tier applications

2007-09-07T10:09:00.000-05:00

ocean Excessive layering plagues many Java applications because they submit to the component and container dichotomy. Containers inevitably produce layers because they are so darned intrusive; combined with so-called good programming practices the result is walls have to be thrown up to protect the mythically valuable business logic from the implementation details of the Container. There's been

GPL as ultimately business friendly

2007-09-04T08:53:00.000-05:00

Richard Hillesley yet the GPL not only proved to be the best protector of the principles of free software, but was also the most business friendly of the licenses available, for one simple reason - companies like IBM, HP, and SGI could contribute openly to the kernel, in the knowledge that the developments of their competitors would also be fed back to the community - Paradoxically, the viral

Networked Genome

2007-08-16T08:53:00.000-05:00

nova spivack A new finding has discovered that the human genome may be highly networked. That is, genes do not operate in isolation, but rather they are networked together in a far more complex ecosystem than previously thought. It may be impossible to separate one gene from another in fact. This throws into question not only our understanding of genetics and the human genome, but also the whole

Emergent Evolution and Design in Language

2007-07-20T07:19:00.000-05:00

Terrence Deacon [Mathematics has] for centuries prompted philosophical debates concerning the origins of abstract form. Consider the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in elementary arithmetic. These are, in one sense, cultural creations. They are conventional operations using culturally created tokens that could be embodied in a seeming infinite variety of

Messaging and Databases: A Story of Heartbreak and Betrayl

2007-05-30T14:39:00.000-05:00

ocean Last week there was some discussion about the value of relational databases and this week it looks like it's messaging's turn for re-examination. It's an interesting proposal and, hey, it's good to revisit sacred cows every once in a while if only to keep them on their toes. ... If the goal of the data fabric is, after all, is distribution of data and horizontal scaling then it's messaging,

Study of protein folds offers insight into metabolic evolution

2007-05-18T11:02:00.000-05:00

Gustavo Caetano-Anollés Researchers at the University of Illinois have constructed the first global family tree of metabolic protein architecture. ... Of 776 metabolic protein folds surveyed, 16 were found to be omnipresent, and nine of those occurred in the earliest branches of the newly constructed tree. "These nine ancient folds represent architectures of fundamental importance undisputedly

Constraints and the real lesson of REST

2007-05-18T07:35:00.000-05:00

Bill de hOra REST isn't even the real lesson; the real lesson is applying principled software design and architectural styles to problem spaces; it's about getting off fads and hype cycles that infect the industry. It's all in the constraints. Topics: REST | Design | Architecture

The biological foundation for what we experience as free will

2007-05-16T07:43:00.000-05:00

Plos one via eurek alert Animals and especially insects are usually seen as complex robots which only respond to external stimuli," says senior author Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin. They are assumed to be input-output devices. "When scientists observe animals responding differently even to the same external stimuli, they attribute this variability to random errors in a complex

Why some social network services work

2007-05-06T20:08:00.000-05:00

Jyri Zengestrom The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. . . . The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life.

The operational meaning of Well Designed

2007-04-17T08:04:00.000-05:00

Ryan Tomayko When I consider what contributed to the unraveling of J2EE, one thing that stands out is that it tried to do too much. The promise was that of infinite scalability based on tooling, which assumes that designing scalable systems is a general case problem. I now firmly believe that this is flawed reasoning. Frameworks don't solve scalability problems, design solves scalability problems

Schemas and Memory Consolidation

2007-04-12T11:06:00.000-05:00

Science Memory encoding occurs rapidly, but the consolidation of memory in the neocortex has long been held to be a more gradual process. We now report, however, that systems consolidation can occur extremely quickly if an associative "schema" into which new information is incorporated has previously been created. In experiments using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task for rats, the

Auto-complete Pidgen Language

2007-03-19T09:35:00.000-05:00

The next big thing in user interface design will be auto-complete pidgen languages linked to Wiki style application interfaces for Data 2.0 data surfing. I've got a few ideas that I will hopefully have time to prototype soon. These ideas link to my very first blog posts. The real work of metadata driven architecture Using Wiki Pidgin Languages to Dynamically Create Links for a Read/Write

An ecology of query languages

2007-03-13T21:15:00.000-05:00

Jon Udell's Interviews with Kingsley Idehen Kingsley: Well, I don't know, you tell me. The semantic web gets kind of confusing because there's a lot of research content and some of the guys are real deep graph model geeks that put out a lot of content. But a lot of people don't look at it because it's already sort-of complex and people switch off without really getting to the best of what's

Tim vs The Semantic Web

2007-03-12T07:21:00.000-05:00

Tim O'Reilly What's so clever is that by articulating the types as a separate structure from the data, and having instances inherit that structure when they are created, users don't think they are providing metadata -- they think they are just providing data. Because anyone creating a new instance is prompted to fill out the data in a structured way, that it doesn't seem like an extra task, but

Coevolution and No Free Lunch Theorem

2007-03-11T12:07:00.000-05:00

David H. Wolpert One ramification of this is the “No Free Lunch” (NFL) theorems, which state that any two algorithms are equivalent when their performance is averaged across all possible problems. This highlights the need for exploiting problem-specific knowledge to achieve better than random performance. . . . In contrast to the traditional optimization case where the NFL results hold, we

Energy flow and the organization of life

2007-03-11T11:29:00.000-05:00

Harold Morowitz Life is universally understood to require a source of free energy and mechanisms with which to harness it. Remarkably, the converse may also be true: the continuous generation of sources of free energy by abiotic processes may have forced life into existence as a means to alleviate the buildup of free energy stresses. . . . A deterministic emergence of life would reflect an

The Future of the World Wide Web

2007-03-04T08:20:00.000-05:00

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee First, the Web will get better and better at helping us to manage, integrate, and analyze data. Today, the Web is quite effective at helping us to publish and discover documents, but the individual information elements within those documents (whether it be the date of any event, the price of a item on a catalog page, or a mathematical formula) cannot be handled directly as

Morning Thoughts

2007-02-28T08:40:00.001-05:00

Worthy adversary: We are known best, by those that we disagree with most and have the greatest respect. Search/Filter/Select/Show related Rich metadata, simple data tables, REST processes Topics: Representation | Meaning | Metadata

Shade garden

2007-02-03T14:41:00.000-05:00

columbine, Jacob's-ladder, Lobelia, Fox glove, beebalm, Lady's Mantle, primrose, pansy, Aquilegia, Polemonium, Lobelia, Digitalis, Monarda, Alchemilla "Lady's Mantle", Primrose, and Viola Topics: Plants | Shadegarden

The new database architecture

2007-02-01T10:18:00.000-05:00

Joe Gregorio I've referenced BigTable a few times recently. As you look at Google, and now eBay, you see they aren't using traditional relational databases, or if they are, they aren't using them in a traditional manner. This isn't an aberration, nor is it a case of NIH, these are the artifacts of working at a different scale, and more importantly, you should expect to see the differences

Open source and the next technology cycle

2007-01-30T12:10:00.000-05:00

Tim O'Reilly Both open source AND proprietary software work at a given moment in time. What I've observed (and wrote about in The Open Source Paradigm Shift) is that openness begets innovation, which leads to commercialization, which leads to companies seeking a proprietary edge, until they go too far, close down innovation, and the cycle restarts. . . . There's a repeating cycle of open and

Parallel LINQ: add automatic multithreading to LINQ queries

2007-01-28T22:24:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Allen With multi-core CPUs finding their way into server farms and the desktop not far behind, new techniques to take advantage of them are desperately needed. Microsoft is seeking to address these with Parallel LINQ, a research project to add automatic multithreading to LINQ queries. Topics: LINQ

How valid is the very concept of an organism in isolation?

2007-01-27T11:23:00.000-05:00

Nature:Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese It is becoming clear that microorganisms have a remarkable ability to reconstruct their genomes in the face of dire environmental stresses, and that in some cases their collective interactions with viruses may be crucial to this. In such a situation, how valid is the very concept of an organism in isolation? It seems that there is a continuity of energy flux

The problem with RDF -- Can I get an Amen

2007-01-18T10:47:00.000-05:00

Stefano Mazzocchi The semantic web is really just data integration at a global scale. Some of this data might end up being consistent, detailed and small enough to perform symbolic reasoning on, but even if this is the case, that would be such a small, expensive and fragile island of knowledge that it would have the same impact on the world as calculus had on deciding to invade Iraq. The biggest

Truth and Space-Time

2007-01-16T10:31:00.000-05:00

buko obeleIt really irritates me when people attribute spatial characteristics (large, small, hidden, above, inside) to truth. It's not an object that actually exists in space [time]. That's part of the problem. Topics: Meaning | Representation

Why Sales isn't process driven

2007-01-12T09:46:00.000-05:00

Steve Jones I'd say that for most Services the concept of "Goals" will be more useful than the concept of "Process". . . . Now I'm not going to say that there is no such thing within an organisation as a sales process, of course there is, but what I'm saying is that this isn't actually the important factor when looking at the success or failure of a sales organisation. Having a process that says

The Wisdom/Dumbness of Crowds

2007-01-04T08:23:00.000-05:00

Kathy Sierra Art isn't made by committee. Great design isn't made by consensus. True wisdom isn't captured from a crowd. At least not when the crowd is acting as a single entity. Clearly there IS wisdom in the many as long as you don't "poison" the crowd by forcing them to agree (voting doesn't mean agreeing). According to Surowiecki, even just sharing too much of your own specialized

Back to the Future: How the Brain "Sees" the Future

2007-01-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

Scientific AmericanNeuroscientists for the first time have identified regions of the brain involved in envisioning future events. Using brain imaging, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that the human mind taps into the same parts of the brain while imagining the future as it does when recollecting the past. This means that the brain apparently predicts the course of future

The most famous quote on computer science

2006-12-28T11:27:00.000-05:00

Anonomous Quote:Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of abstraction/indirection, except for too many layers of abstraction/indirection. Topics: Architecture | Best Practices

When to use RDF

2006-12-14T08:17:00.000-05:00

Bob DuCharme The RDF/OWL strength that makes it popular for semantic web work is its ability to query collections of data in the same domain that aren't necessarily all of identical structure. A collection of insurance policies from different companies will have some fields in common, some different fields, some fields that look different but mean the same thing... treating them as a consistent

Where usability gurus usually fail

2006-11-27T12:44:00.000-05:00

Ajaxian The text lines (measure) are too long. 100% scalable is not a reader friendly solution: Don’t make me think, ok, but don’t make me resize my window either. Lack of whitespace. Lack of active whitespace. Linespacing is too narrow. The text blocks are not well alined. Too many font sizes. Pictures are badly placed and disrupt the ease reading. Topics: HTML | Design

Google vs Microsoft and the future of competition

2006-11-02T08:51:00.000-05:00

John Milan The two elephants of personal computing these days are Microsoft and Google. Microsoft rose to dominance by capturing the desktop. Google is rising to dominance by capturing the web. Both strategies revolve around who can capture your data. Elephants require massive amounts of food to survive, so it's no surprise that Microsoft and Google are eyeing each other's data. Microsoft has

Random , ordered , and functional Complexity

2006-10-31T14:38:00.000-05:00

David L Abel1 and Jack T TrevorsGenetic algorithms instruct sophisticated biological organization. Three qualitative kinds of sequence complexity exist: random (RSC), ordered (OSC), and functional (FSC). FSC alone provides algorithmic instruction. Random and Ordered Sequence Complexities lie at opposite ends of the same bi-directional sequence complexity vector. Randomness in sequence space is

The future of applications and platforms

2006-10-29T11:43:00.000-05:00

Tim O'Reilly In my talks on Web 2.0, I always end with the point that "a platform beats an application every time." We're entering the platform phase of Web 2.0, in which first generation applications are going to turn into platforms, followed by a stage in which the leaders use that platform strength to outperform their application rivals, eventually closing them out of the market. And that

The new data architecture

2006-10-24T07:35:00.000-05:00

Wired Google apparently has responded by replicating everything everywhere. The system is intensively redundant; if one server fails, the other half million don't know or care. But this creates new challenges. The software must break up every problem into ever more parallel processes. In the end, each ingenious solution becomes the new problem of a specialized, even sclerotic, device. The

The argument for Sharepoint/Office vNext

2006-10-06T08:13:00.000-05:00

Arpan ShahAlso, on the Internet, as I mentioned before, Web 2.0 refers to browser applications... in the Enterprise, it doesn't have to be browser only if you consider my definition of web 2.0 which is about transforming users into participants. It has to be easy so people can interact... and this includes familiar applications like Office. If it's easy to consume and publish content from Office,

Innovation thru constraint

2006-10-04T11:40:00.000-05:00

Sean McGrath I see two ways to rationalize this. The first via philolinguistics. It could be that the very definition of innovation in the world of computing includes the idea of suceeding in the face of some constraints. After all, this is (for the most part) a real-world engineering discipline right? You know the drill: "time, cost, quality. Pick two." We eat and drink constraints in

The problem with RDF

2006-09-26T09:56:00.000-05:00

Richard Cyganiak Q: Shouldn’t we concentrate more on RDF data and schema than OWL? A: Maybe – but I’m a logician, not a database guy. Q: (Klaus Schild) Scalability? OWL is NP-complete. A: Distribution helps. Certain combinations of operators are deadly, but if the two operators happen to end up on different nodes, things can be much faster. But in general it’s a problem. Q: But if you take

The evolution of evolution

2006-09-23T09:19:00.000-05:00

Jordan ZlatevI started as a computational linguist, but soon got disappointed at the complete inability of computational models to account for real, meaningful human language. I studied cognitive linguistics and cognitive science and experimented with connectionist modeling of language, but eventually have found these, like the old AI programs and parsers to be semiotically inadequate. Adaptive (

Deconstructing Databases

2006-09-22T08:31:00.000-05:00

Greg Stein via Dale He believed that existing systems spent too much time deciding how to structure data entry and presenting a detailed form for users to fill out. They also then lock down the display of the information. He decided to keep structured data entry to a minimum and rely on text entry. A lot happens with labels/tags/keywords, for instance, to assign priority. The new bug submission

What Limits Software Growth

2006-09-22T07:57:00.000-05:00

John Ousterhout Unfortunately, everything in software leads to more complexity. There are various laws of physics people have discovered, and there are corresponding laws of software. The first law of software is that software systems tend towards increasing states of complexity. It's almost a perfect mirror of the First Law of Thermodynamics in physics . . . The techniques in extreme programming

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

2006-08-24T11:28:00.000-05:00

alex at base4.net Now this is revolutionary. Amazon is attempting to create massively scaleable grid computing for the masses. Have I said it is cheap yet? $0.10 per hour per instance. And should load get too high you can simple startup more instances, turning computing power on and off like a tap! From what I can see looking through the notes, EC2 images (i.e. think of this as Virtual Machine

Gall's Law

2006-08-23T07:51:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. Topics: Design | BestPractices

XML is tomorrow's COBOL

2006-08-22T08:32:00.000-05:00

alex at base4.net Maybe XML is the COBOL of the future. Millions of applications have been written to emit and consume XML, just like there are billions of lines of COBOL code still in production. But if I’m right we will soon move on to a much smarter approach based on self-describing, self contained and open databases. It would share all XML’s key benefits, but it would be in a much better

The true nature of javascript

2006-08-17T08:10:00.000-05:00

Interview with Dojo Creator Alex Russell As a language, JavaScript is still horribly misunderstood. All real power in JavaScript comes from understanding closures, the "everything is always mutable" property, and the prototype chain. These are foreign concepts to Java developers who don't have FP or scripting backgrounds. . . . The JavaScript style of data hiding via closures is the flip-side of

Is there real world RDF-S/OWL instance data?

2006-08-13T12:32:00.000-05:00

Tim Finin Only about 5% of these documents contain *any* triples that contribute to a definition. The rest consist of all data. We’ve determined that most of the 5% that contain definitional triples do so incorrectly and should be all data. Of the remaining ones, many are duplicates and copies. We estimate that only about 1% of Swoogle’s collection are proper ‘ontologies’ that are intended to (

The Progress and the Promise of Microformats.

2006-07-28T14:28:00.000-05:00

Sean McGrath For decades now, well meaning theorists, architects and engineers have struggled with the problem of allowing electronic content to serve two needs : human readability and machine readability. For decades now, initiatives to create structured content vocabularies have come into existence, burned brightly in the full glare of enthusiasm+publicity only to then fade away into obscurity

The XML Object Impedance Mismatch

2006-07-28T12:31:00.000-05:00

Ralf L¨ammel, Erik Meijer Initially, it may seem that one can set up a simple and faithful correspondence between XML types and object types. The first thing to notice is that such a correspondence certainly is not self-evident; there are dozens of X/O mapping technologies that assume quite different mapping rules. Let us try to define one such correspondence. We may start with the following

Queso - a Semantic Web/Web 2.0 server

2006-07-27T11:18:00.000-05:00

Elias Torres Human Accessible Queso AJAX Atom Browser: http://abdera.watson.ibm.com:8080/browser/ Queso AJAX SPARQL UI: http://abdera.watson.ibm.com:8080/browser/sparql/ Machine Enabled Queso Atom Server Endpoint: http://abdera.watson.ibm.com:8080/atom/ Queso SPARQL Endpoint: http://abdera.watson.ibm.com:8080/sparql/ Topics: Atom | Web2.0 | RDF

Learning to love monad comprehensions

2006-07-27T10:51:00.000-05:00

Mike Champion You don't need to be scared about this functional construction and transformation stuff just because "introductory" articles on the subject start talking about Haskell, monads, lambda calculus, etc. in about the second paragraph. With the help of our friendly local ex-professors and Haskell geeks Dr. Meijer and Dr. Lämmel, I have learned to stop worrying and love monad

Web 2.0 (Fools) Gold Rush

2006-07-24T08:41:00.000-05:00

Phil WainewrightIf Web 2.0 really is a gold rush, this will be the first in history when the people pushing the maps are the ones who've had their fingers burned. Mapping mashups are the fool's gold of Web 2.0 not merely because they produce no revenue, but far more crucially because they add no new semantic value to the integrations they perform. The real wealth creators will be those who offer

Asynchronous WebService calls in ASP.NET: BEWARE

2006-07-14T08:35:00.000-05:00

Asynchronous WebService calls – the truth behind the Begin… End… functions I’ve finally solved this one – not that the resolution makes me happy, but it’s nice to finally explain the behavior. I ran into a funny behavior four years ago with WebService calls on the .Net platform. At that time, my idea was to launch webservice calls simultaneously against multiple backend webservices. The effect

Understanding the Future of Data: Data 2.0

2006-06-16T10:01:00.000-05:00

Alex@base4 I think the future of data lies in creating a virtual database over web-services and other sources of data. Data 2.0 if you will. If we had this virtual database spanning web-services then life would be so much easier for Web 2.0 application developers. . . . why? Well you 'the Web 2.0 developer' probably don't own all the data you want to use, and the real owner of that data

The network is the network: public radio on the web

2006-06-05T08:22:00.000-05:00

Jon Udell's Weblog Here's what I like even more. John has correctly observed that, if a bunch of radio stations were to insert location and topic tags into their RSS feeds, it would be trivial for an aggregator to scoop them up. Listeners could then create -- and share -- custom radio programming. Topics: Web2.0 | NPR

Data 2.0

2006-06-02T10:33:00.000-05:00

To me Web 2.0 is really Data 2.0 (on the web), where what I mean by Data 2.0, is a new level of abstraction that sits above our traditional thinking about centralized SQL Relation database systems. The totalitarian authority of a fixed predefined relational schema as the central pivot around which all data processing revolves, may soon be giving way to a more flexible and variable set of data

Feeding Google Co-Op with SPARQL

2006-05-26T07:27:00.000-05:00

Leigh Dodds Last night I took my first look at Google Co-op, in particular the "Subscribed Links" feature which allows users to add services to Google search results. The developer documentation outlines the process by which you can go about creating a service, which is simply a matter of creating a fairly simple XML configuration file. The configuration breaks down into two key chunks: search