Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, November 01, 2003
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Friday, October 31, 2003
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How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
Here's an interesting text by science-fiction author Philip K. Dick
that starts out examining key questions he's been asking himself for
all his career - "What is
reality?" and "What is the authentic human?" - and segues into rather
strange thoughts on theology and the (non-)existence of time. The
origin of the quote "Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn't go away." is explained near the beginning.
I like to build universes which do fall apart.
I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the
novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be
more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not
assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a
universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the
birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish.
This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually
part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of
the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we
ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs,
habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can
live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable,
elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
Dick offers a definition of an "authentic human being" towards the end:
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should
not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it,
even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves.
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no
to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their
deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their
names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to
be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their
willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In
essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
 3:36:34 PM
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Gamer glossary
Greg Costikyan: Talk Like a Gamer. The gamer subculture has been expanding the uses of language just as hackers did over the previous decades, spotting patterns and making up names to refer to them among themselves. Sample quote:
A mule is a secondary character used to provide more storage
space for the crap you want to hang on to; if your backpack is full,
just fire up the mule character and give him/her/it the stuff to carry.
A mule will water ski, meaning it will automatically follow the main character about, like a boat pulling a water skier.
As I wrote in an earlier post titled Growing a language, I believe
knowledge work is moving in that general direction, an increasing part
of it consisting in constructing, naming, and disseminating new
concepts.
2:33:53 PM
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Thursday, October 30, 2003
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What's new about weblogs
Andrew Grumet: "Weblogs, among other things, facilitate highly robust, amorphous,
constantly changing, overlapping, individually filterable communities
that are like nothing that has come before."
This post also appears on channel weblog research
9:59:45 PM
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Most valuable commenter
I wish there were a page that aggregated the comments that Jon Husband keeps posting in all the right places - except for his own weblog.
4:39:49 PM
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2lmc spool
I wonder what software powers this terse discussion linkblog.
The modus operandi looks useful as a means of sharing links in small
groups with shared context (i.e., coworkers). Are they feeding an IRC log into a nicely permalinked, archived weblog?
3:11:49 PM
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Get that job a guy!
Fellow KM blogger David Gammel has just announced a Knowledge Manager position at the American Speech-Hearing-Language Association in DC.
Cluster/Team: Communications-Web Cluster/Knowledge and Community Management Team
Coach: David Gammel
The purpose of this position is to manage ASHA’s knowledge
management infrastructure as well as assist in the overall development
of the program in conjunction with the Knowledge and Community
Management Team.
Among the required skills I see:
Advanced knowledge of search engines, weblogs, content management, and other related web publishing technologies
I'm letting it pass as I already have a job, but I know I'd look
forward to working with someone as clueful as David. Respond by noon,
November 3.
2:46:27 PM
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Musings' anniversaries
Jim Mcgee's Musings and Liz Lawley's Mamamusings
had simultaneous birthdays (2 and 1, respectively) on October 22nd!
Congrats - it's great to have you both around, and your writing is as
enjoyable as it ever was! Speaking of Liz, she and a crew of top-notch
women bloggers have recently started Misbehaving.net,
a group weblog on women and technology. I'm sure this presence will
help accelerate the involvement of women in technology use and
development.
And Jacques Distler's Musings
turned one on October 13th. Perhaps surprisingly given that the Web was
started by a bunch of particle physicists, physics researchers remain a
hard find in blogspace, so I think Jacques should be commended for
keeping his blog up - especially after characterizing the activity as a
tremendous waste of time
three months into the experience! He's been hacking quite a bit, too.
His blog is one of the only ones out there where you'll find nicely
formatted equations. Hovering around his links list in the sidebar is
quite interesting, too - try it.
10:04:25 AM
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Wednesday, October 29, 2003
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Hire Ton! Fund Gary!
Ton is looking for work
anywhere in Europe/North America. I've been reading his blog since he
started and have met him in person. I think he's a first-rate thinker
and communicator. He
"would expect strategic vision and leadership of any employer". That's
a lot to ask, I know, so please don't hesitate to throw any hint you
might have his way.
Gary is also in dire need of paid work. His latest business plan (part I) is an intriguing way of routing around the entrenched music promotion/distribution players. (Part II here.)
In a nutshell, I propose we take the blog phenomenon that works so well
for political writers, and we apply it to musicians. The only
difference really is that writers write, while musicians record sounds,
but there's also that bit of meta-data around the recording and that's
what we're shipping.
As you can imagine, funding would help bring this vision to fruition.
For as little as $2,000 (Canadian), Gary says he'll love you forever.
10:10:19 PM
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"Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have
been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to
do that very thing."
- John Andrew Holmes
10:21:54 AM
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Tuesday, October 28, 2003
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Emergence, reverence, and irrelevance
The life of OR
has been a short one. It was born here late in the 1930's. By the mid
60's it had gained widespread acceptance in academic, scientific, and
managerial circles. In my opinion this gain was accompanied by a loss
of its pioneering spirit, its sense of mission and its innovativeness.
Survival, stability and respectability took precedence over
development, and its decline began.
I hold academic OR and the relevant professional societies primarily
responsible for this decline-and since I had a hand in initiating both,
I share this responsibility. By the mid 1960's most OR courses in
American universities were given by academics who had never practised
it. They and their students were text-book products engaging in impure
research couched in the language, but not the reality, of the real
world. The meetings and journals of the relevant professional
societies, like classrooms, were filled with abstractions from an
imagined reality. As a result OR came to be identified with the use of
mathematical models and algorithms rather than the ability to formulate
management problems, solve them, and implement and maintain their
solutions in turbulent environments.
Eventually the tails begins wagging the dog. "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
[...] In the first two decades of OR, its nature was dictated by the nature of the problematic situations it
faced. Now the nature of the situations it faces is dictated by the techniques it has at its command.
There's an interesting passage on interdisciplinarity as a sign of the aliveness of a field:
Subjects, disciplines, and professions are categories that are useful
in filing scientific knowledge and in dividing the labour involved in
its pursuit, but they are nothing more than this. Nature and the world
are not organized as science and universities are. There are no
physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological or even
Operational Research problems. These are names of different
points-of-view, different aspects of the same reality, not different
kinds of reality. Any problematic situation can be looked at from the
point-of-view of any discipline, but not necessarily with equal
fruitfulness.
[...] The fact that the world is
in such a mess as it is is largely due to our decomposing messes into
unidisciplinary problems that are treated independently of each other.
Don't miss the ironic postscript, too.
A related earlier post of mine is Information systems research: towards irrelevance?
8:56:00 PM
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Seb Fiedler in town
Sebastian Fiedler
has been spending a few days over here in Moncton (and on Prince Edward
Island). We've had a great time bouncing all kinds of ideas around. If you're around
Moncton, you might be interested in knowing that Seb will be giving a
talk today:
Personal
Webpublishing networks: A conversational learning
environment for self-organized learners
Speaker:
Sebastian Fiedler, University of
Augsburg
(Germany)
Date:
Tuesday, October
28, 2003
Time:
10:45
p.m. – noon (Atlantic Standard
Time)
Location:
Jacqueline-Bouchard
Building (Room 163), Université de Moncton,
Moncton,
New
Brunswick
For those
who will not be in the Moncton area and are interested to
attend Sebastian Fiedler's presentation, please note that this session will be
recorded and made available through the Internet. If this option is of interest
to you, contact Shannon
Watts (Shannon.Watts@gnb.ca) and specify that
you are interested in viewing the webcast version
and we will send you the url
and related instructions as soon as the recorded presentation becomes
available.
In case you've been wondering, Seb's domain name is broken at the moment but he's trying hard to get things straightened up.
7:06:51 AM
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Meeting on the cheap
Peter Rukavina:
note to bureaucrats: next time an eager group comes to you with a
$300,000 funding request to host a conference, point them back at this
post and ask them to explain themselves.
6:40:56 AM
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Sunday, October 26, 2003
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Alf Eaton: "Google's Glossary function works really well
with medical terms."
11:20:35 AM
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Zap your PRAM: Stephen Regoczei
Thanks to the Silverorange folks for organizing this. (Applause).
Thanks for including me. In a sense I still don't know what the
conference is about, but I am convinced that something important is
happening here.
I love paper. I have tremendous respect for file folders. They have
power. This world is run by the engineers and by the administrators.
Taking a page out of Art's presentation, I have chosen to select random
pages from my file and walk you through it.
I'm a conceptual analyst. Most people are afraid of looking at concepts. I decided
to save the world the other day, realizing I'm just as qualified as
anyone else. (By the way here's Salam Pax in Toronto's French language newspaper.)
Saving the world is a futile attempt. If you're doing something new,
you must improvise. The world has been saved many times recently.
Paris, 1919, it was time to save the world and they botched it. It was
the war to end all wars. Recently a book came out with the title "The
peace to end all peace". We've just been saved from nuclear holocaust.
I like that. It has also been saved from "limits to growth" collapse.
In 1989 the Berlin wall was brought down. Some administrators in Hungary
and in Austria decided that opening the border was good. In 1999 there was the
battle in Seattle....
Whole Earth Catalog, Out of Control mentioned. Brand's "We are as gods" spiel - 1968. A revolution in kindness - Anita Roddick.
Goodnight Moon. I've read this hundreds of times. Every time I'm
permeated by the good vibes. They don't push words into your mouths,
just pictures. Let us have pictures and video in b'logs, that's what
kindred spirits are about.
Hmm... I'm getting lost here... I guess I should stop blogging and just listen.
Selected quotes:
- Saving the world is easy. Selling is difficult.
- Books are not finished, they are abandoned.
- It's brutal what the education system does to defenseless human beings.
- Miracles happen overnight just by people changing their minds.
Stephen invites Dave Winer to the front.
"I learned this about B'logs. I had basically given up on developing
software because I was promoting Mac software but the people who
controlled the flow of information believed there was no Mac software.
Even though journalists were using Macs. With the Web I could tell my
story without needing reporters. It couldn't have happened without the
web.
Q. Buzz: Did you think that Apple itself was a detriment to the growth of Mac software?
A. Yes. We had this expo' during which Apple laid off many employees
who were at the show. At dinner they were very honest. They told us
Apple strategically fought the Internet because it wasn't WYSIWYG.
We want our stars to be perfect, no blemishes. But at the same time we want to believe we're getting the truth.
We don't have a mechanism for moving things ahead now. The software industry does lose decades to stagnation.
John: I'm just getting a sense of who you are in the blogging
community. I think you have gone from torpedo to a battleship. 20-year
olds want to sink you.
Dave: I'm not a battleship. I'm a human being. I have all the traits of
a human being. They paint a target on me. I don't want to be a
battleship. I want everybody to be strong.
Here's something new. I want to change Scripting News so it's no longer a weblog.
Peter: Rob, your blog started as a consultant blog - here's interesting
article, etc. Then your mother-in-law died which opened a curtain to
your personal life. You got some flak. How can we let people be
vulnerable.
Dave: We should have a board of people who take the bullshit for us. If
somebody has a problem with us these people should filter it.
Tessa: My husband has a blog and got a lot of shit for it. I think
there's a clear line in my life between the private and the public. My
public persona is detached from my private persona.
Dave: But we don't want to separate personas.
Tessa: People do want personas. They don't want persons.
Dave: My uncle got a blog in 1996. He died recently. Can I write about
him when he's dead? To me I don't think there's a line anymore. I
thought about it for 20 minutes before concluding that I wanted to
write about it publicly.
Rob: For most people you're not Dave, you're Iconic Dave. Most people are treating you like a symbol.
Q. Do you ever not write some things?
Dave: Yes. It can be very painful to decide not to write about something, especially when others write about it.
Further discussion ensues.
10:48:05 AM
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Buzz Bruggeman just showed me how he built a chain integrating
ActiveWords, NewsGator, and Typepad to enable blogging. Rather slick.
10:35:52 AM
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This morning I spoke with Dave. We
compared our orientations. I think right now he's very much into
enabling more people to join the two-way Web, while I'm more interested
in extending blogging systems in natural ways that make information
more organized.
10:33:02 AM
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Zap your PRAM: Tessa Blake and Ian Williams
I'm blogging the Zap your PRAM conference right now. My first try at liveblogging - let's see how it goes. Expect a telegraphic, impressionistic style.
Ian and Tessa screened their film The Pink House. Ian wrote it and they both directed. The film was shot in 2001 and has been into editing since.
Q. [Me] So how did you make it look like film?
Ian: Things are more gripping on film.
Tessa: There's a theory that says that 24 fps induces the alpha brainwave states. TV, which is 30 fps, creates more
Ian: We shot this in PAL - 25 fps, interlaced. I took this through a
de-interlacer that goes to 24 fps, creates flicker, and adds grain,
which looks like film. Many shots you couldn't tell were shot in video.
Tessa: A lot of shots were from very deep so that definition is only around what we shoot.
Ian: We put a smoke machine. Smoke in video somehow translates into grain in film.
Tessa: We just now maybe have money to turn this into 35mm. One of the
reasons we chose DVCam is DV pops colors. This story is comicbook style
so we didn't want digibeta.
Q. [Rob] Editing has gotta be easier in digital.
A. [Tessa] I'm an old-school film cutter. I'm biased towards that type,
maybe sentimentally. As a young editor trained on film, it forces me to
think carefully about whether the cut works.
A. [Ian] This is BS. You can do the same in digital;
[Peter] I did graphic design with Letraset and used Xactos to piece things together.
[John Muir] I've cut tape and I'm glad it's gone.
Q. Can you tell us about the music?
A. [Tessa] The secret of this film is a lot of the music is Ian's. A
lot is Ian's mother's; Ian's father's; his sister sings. About 60% of
the music is Ian's family. The lush parts of the score are by Ian's
mother.
A. [Ian] If you layer a real violinist with a string pad it sounds like 18 violinists. Mom is the worldwide expert on this.
Q. What about logos? Artwork?
A. Yes. I'm afraid we might get in trouble at some point. Much stuff is obscure enough that We had product placement.
Shooting this in 18 days, with 2 largely non-professional crews
simultaneously, is a bad idea. We had no less than 14-16 hour days.Our
gaffer was insane. We were stuck on the moon and couldn't replace
anybody on the spot. One actor shattered his hand, bones sticking out.
The weather was bad. Two kind of typhoons came towards the end. A
lighting bolt almost killed the art crew.
[Ian] It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
Q. [Peter] Some of the references
seemed quite specific to me. How do you ensure the cultural references
will fly with a variety of people and age well?
Comment: Sorority culture is not as prevalent here in Canada.
A. [Ian] It's a kind of scripted bacchanalia.
A. [Tessa] There are so many archetypes in there that everybody recognizes something.
Comment [SebF] This is so much like what I saw as a German exchange student in Georgia [Tessa laughs].
At one point I was driving with a friend and saw those sorority clones
lined up - hundreds of them. People didn't believe me back home.
(Further discussion which I didn't blog, as I made an effort to help empty the beer vat.)
1:30:46 AM
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