The World Behind the Glass

Christmas, a Time for Pagans

2011-12-21T05:13:00.003Z

I understand that there is a community in Michigan who received letters from someone complaining about those pagan lights on their houses and in their yards. Urging them to remove these pagan symbols from their christian lives.

Someone needs to say something about this.

Hmmm...yeah

PISS OFF!

Folks, I hate to be the bearer of scary news, but...uh...it's all pagan.

Virtually all of our rituals at this time of year have their origins in old, old pagan beliefs. From Celtic rituals to Norse Legends, and Northern European stories of grinchy old guys to get children to mind their manners...it's all pagan.

Dec 25, the day when Mithras (Roman God, "the unconquered son") had his birth celebrated. His whole story was appropriated by early Christians and wrapped around their little chid in the manger (which was imported from Egypt's story of Osiris). Virgin births are everywhere in myth...Krishna, Osiris, Mithras, Jesus ... lots of conception going on without the benefit of male sperm.

Evergreen trees to remind us of life surviving through the darkness of winter (and old Yule Logs used similarly)

A lot of this is from the Roman Saturnalia, including 12/25 as the birthday of the 'unconquered son', Mithras. (His entire story looks a LOT like the Christ myth too, but then so does Osiris's)

This is really all about the return of the sun. The winter solstice, Dec 22, the shortest day of the year. But after that, by 12/25, you can see the days are getting longer and this is incredibly important to an agrarian society. The wolves did not eat them, the sun did not stay gone, the days became longer, and the snows melted.

The germanic and scandinavian mid winter celebrations gave us trees and logs and many other rituals.

And Santa most likely grew first out of very, very old tales of a boogie man used to keep children in line. Then he got merged with Sinterklass and ultimately a Byzantine bishop. Of course he didn't really take shape until Moore dropped him down a chimney and Coca Cola took him in and fattened him up.

But make no mistake, he IS an elf, a pagan forest creature, and in most of history has been more about punishment or denial to children (remember the lump of coal) than about giving presents and having a 5 billion name address book.

None of this detracts from Christmas celebrations. Religious people can certainly participate in these lighting and singing rituals, these present exchanges and good meals. Just remember, they are all about the return of the sun ... the homophone is only coincidental.

So whoever is trying to rain on the parade of good churchgoing folk in Michigan and on the parade of many of us non-believers who still love the season and celebrate its older, deeper meanings,

PISS OFF!

It is, in fact, wonderful that the Christian religion preserved these old myths and rituals and absorbed them into their myths and legends. People need stories, myths, and celebrations to get through a life that is often harsh, brutish, and looooonnnnggg.

The world is a harsh, brutal and scary place. Every year we survive is a good year, but we, even in this day and age, can never be sure we will survive to see the return of the sun after the solstice. So there can be little wrong with celebrating that return by giving gifts, decorating trees and houses, lighting lights, and singing carols.

Anyone who thinks that these holiday celebrations should be discarded for mere religion does not understand humanity at all.

Bill

Want more jobs? Take your business elsewhere

2011-11-03T19:45:00.002Z

We are experiencing another dark side of efficiency.

And too much efficiency is hell.

Many businesses are sitting on piles of cash and not hiring ... we hear about this daily. But why? Job recovery is always a lagging indicator in a recession, but we've been 'out' now for a while and yet even as the layoff and job LOSS rate flattens, the hiring rate does not pick up.

That may be because business is so efficient right now, with the improved communications and control ability brought about through automation and internet connectivity, that businesses are able to satisfy the load on their capacity with fewer and fewer people.

But there is a downside to that and it is the consumer who suffers it.

Just today I was essentially turned away from a garage for an oil change (very early on) because they had too much work to get done in a day...if I come back tomorrow, even earlier, I may get a slot.

I bypassed McDonald's for breakfast because the drive through line this morning was snaking out into the street. And the inside line was outrageously long too.

I skipped Starbuck's for coffee for the same reasons.

Note, I said line. Both places had so few staff on board at 7.30 this morning that they could only staff one inside line.

Last Sunday the same thing happened at another Starbuck's. Long drive thru line, TWO inside lines, and only 3 baristas in the store. One poor person was trying to make drinks and take orders at a register simultaneously. Take it from someone who's run a cafe before...that is no way to make a good cup of coffee or run a coffee shop.

I asked there why they didn't have at least one other person (that much business, they really needed +2) and was told management wouldn't hire any more. "We just have to deal".

Sonic has trimmed the fat off its menus...wait, actually, they've trimmed the lean...virtually all the chicken sandwiches are gone and if you look carefully you realize all they really offer are variations on a hamburger...with or without cheese, bun or texas toast, one greasy patty or two. The whole menu can be summed up in a single sentence.

So, while it may be amazingly efficient to eak out every erg of work related energy and every therblig of productivity from fewer and fewer workers, the consumers suffer poor response times, poor choice, poorer quality goods and service, and a general feeling that they are being abused.

Of course the workers suffer as well; horribly overworked, unable to concentrate, fearful for their own continuance of employment.

Perfectly efficient capacity utilization...it sounds wonderful. We do more with less which translates, on paper, to an apparent increase in productivity and value.

But let's face it...it's crap! So what can we, the consumer do?

Here's what I did

I pulled into the Sonic, looked at the menu, and when the staff member came on to take my order, I politely told her I was going elsewhere because their selection was now so poor.
I politely explained to the Starbuck's barista who served me my Americano that he should mention to his manager that one customer won't be back until they hire more staff.
I told the garage manager that I was happy to hear they had so much business, but I would find another oil change place that had enough capacity to handle an oil change and tune-up more rapidly than 24 hours.
I did not speak to today's McDonald's and Starbuck's folk, but I also did not purchase from them.

We used to have a saying..."no one comes here anymore, it's too busy."

A business needs to have a bit of over capacity...a bit of stretch room. If your capacity is operating at 100%, you have exactly the number of employees to handle exactly the number of customers you get, then you have too few employees or too many customers. The slightest hiccup (an illness, a stopped up toilet) leads to unhappy customers.

We take this into account when we order computing hardware; servers and network gear. If you order just enough that you run at 100% utilization, all of your customers will be unhappy with the poor performance. You HAVE to have some extra capacity not just to handle spikes, but to keep things running smoothly for customers during ordinary times.

Few businesses will hire more staff if everything SEEMS to be running smoothly. The base load of work is getting done, customers are coming in and buying goods and services, employees are not collapsing in the aisles from exhaustion.

The best way to send a message to a business that they need to change is to NOT buy their goods or services. Walk away. Vote with your feet. But they need to know why.

So if you find yourself in situations like mine, let the manager or someone know. Start a gentle murmur of discontent on the client-side. Don't buy from them if you feel they need to hire more people.

Now, the key is, of course to be very polite, understand the person you say anything to (even the store manager in many cases) cannot do a damned thing about the lack of capacity, but make sure they understand you are walking away from that business because it has not staffed up to provide a modicum of over capacity and a bit of breathing room for employees.

Don't tell them they are too busy to handle your needs. Tell them they are too understaffed to handle your needs. Tell them something very specific like that.

And you don't have to boycott...you can come back another time and make a purchase if you need to. But if you decide to walk away because there are not enough people to help you, let the store know. They need to know and the best WANT to know.

Business will get the message. If there is a perception that a lack of staff is leading to a fall off of custom, change will occur. And more jobs will suddenly, magically, appear.

Is any business likely to suffer greatly or have to lay off more people because YOU choose to walk away? Hell no! They won't let it get that far. One person says it to them it's nothing. Ten people mention it and walk away, it's weird. After a month of hearing it fro 30, 50, 100 customers, business management WILL act and more people will be hired.

Look how fast the banks backed off when consumers just said, "NO". A consistent, gentle nudge from many, many people can move even a giant stone.

Too much efficiency sucks...systems run best when well within their tolerances, when they have a bit of give, and with a certain amount of noise in the signal.

Just my thoughts.

Comments?

The Zombification of a Culture

2011-06-30T00:51:00.007+01:00

Zombies.

Have you noticed their recent proliferation in culture? They are mentioned, shown, discussed, denigrated, and used for amazing things.

First, lets discuss shambling. Shambling is what zombies do. The shamble...they come at their victims with a stiff-armed shambling walk. The make their way toward their victims at a shambling pace.

As far as I can determine, the ONLY context in which we use the word SHAMBLING is when we are discussing zombies. Technically shambling is just a style of walk...a slow, awkward gait.

But we only seem to ever speak of Zombies shambling. How very weird. Others shuffle and things may be in a SHAMBLES, but only zombies are described as shambling.

Zombies have entered not only pop culture (where they have been since Romero made Night of the Living Dead) but now they have entered advertising. A recent car commercial has a very urbane, neatly dressed zombie driving along in a new car. He tend to lose fingers, but that is just an occupational hazard when you are a reanimated desiccated decaying corpse.

Let's not forget that the CDC has preparations online for a zombie apocalypse. It is viewable here.

Then there is the zombie proof house in Poland. See it here.

And the weird Toshiba commercial with the 'for want of a nail' approach...If the newest laptop goes out without a shockproof hard drive, its that zombie apocalypse!

And lastly, they appear on magazine covers. I refer, of course, to the recent Newsweek cover showing an algorithmically aged Diana apparently out and about with Kate. This was done to commemorate what would have been her 50th Birthday, but as one commenter said, wouldn't NOT making her a zombie have been a better gift?

I wonder if she shambled as she walked with Kate during the photo shoot?

Thoughts?

Reading Where You Are

2011-05-17T17:34:00.002+01:00

A colleague, John Breslin, sent me a reference to a new book and website on the changing nature of reading. It struck a chord, so I thought I would share.

The book is I Read Where I Am ... http://www.valiz.nl/en/IReadWhereIAm and its contents are also available at http://www.ireadwhereiam.com/

The topic, as you might guess, is reading and the changing nature of reading in the 21st century.

Back in the late 90's I was presenting at conferences on what I called the post-literate age we were entering...when literacy as we've understood it throughout the 19th and 20th centuries would fade in importance as new forms of storytelling came online. I think 'reading' in the 21st century will heavily involve the visual arts, media, video and audio in the future. The ability to simultaneously merge text, txt, video, audio, and image into a single communique gives everyone a huge opportunity to modify and adapt 'language' as they see fit.

The discussions in the essays about whether texting is writing or reading texts is reading are completely missing the point. We have an excellent opportunity to watch our language (and many other languages) change and evolve right before our eyes almost in real time. Most adults today would be hard pressed to understand a general text from the mid 19th century and have little hope of comprehending one from the 18th or 17th centuries. The differences between what we consider modern literature today vs what our grand or great grand children will consider it are likely far beyond even the differences we see between 21st century modern and 18th century enlightenment era texts.

The comments about art and engineering being at odds I found funny. These days artists work closely with engineers to achieve special effects both in commercial and non-commercial art. Technology and a growing awareness of physics in the art community have led to some fantastic new media emerging. So, I think any discussion of art and engineering being at odds with each other is either ill informed or disingenuous.

Of course, as in all endeavors, Sturgeon's law applies (90% of everything is crap!) so we get a lot of junk from both professional and amateur artists.

There is actually probably an order of magnitude more 'reading' and 'writing' going on today than there was in the 1960's, for instance (There is an NEA report from 2009 indicating a rise in reading in the US since 1982. The link's below.). Worries such as "reading twitter feeds is not 'real' reading" is silly. Reading Dickens in his original published form (serialized in a magazine) was considered invalid reading in its time.

The whole concept of the novel was considered invalid reading in the 17th century when it was invented. So it is important to remember that 'reading', even 'literary reading' is a dynamic, fluid thing. In the future, anyone reading a 'text' which contains only print and no interactivity, annotation, video,and audio may very well be considered to not be 'reading' by, say, a late 21st century standard.

There must have been Sumerians who said, "That papyrus stuff is just a fad. It just doesn't feel like reading if you don't have a good clay tablet in your hand!"

The NEA Report is at http://www.nea.gov/research/Readingonrise.pdf

Bill

The NOOKcolor has a problem

2011-02-12T21:06:00.002Z

I gave my wife a NOOKcolor for Christmas and she has had trouble with it ever since. Now I know what it is, how to reproduce it, and that B&N NOOK service sucks! But maybe this will help others.

She reads a few pages, then suddenly it stops responding. Moments later the blue bottom menu starts going up and down and up and down with no end.

As well, suddenly, words will get highlighted and the word help menu will pop up and then disappear. Or pages will simply start turning, one after another. At some point it stops responding or it just glitches with the blue menu going up and down. You cannot even turn it off the normal way.

But if you get it to go off, re-booting seems to clear it up.

It's as if the device is possessed by a poltergeist

I looked on the web and saw several other people have reported the problem. I upgraded to the latest software and the problem still remains. So today, I set about diagnosing it.

The problem typically occurs after she has read about 5 pages either in the tub or while sitting in the bathroom after a shower. But sometimes it happens while she is reading in bed. With a glass of tea by the bedside.

Moisture! ... If you touch the screen with wet fingers, you can reproduce this problem. the device doesn't have to get really wet, wet...just damp. turning the page after licking your finger may well do it. It is much more likely to occur if you touch it with two wet fingers or if you try to turn the page forward with one wet finger, then turn the page back, leaving two slightly damp spots on the screen.

Even slightly sweaty fingers after a workout or yard work are enough to glitch it.

We called 800 THE-BOOK ... their final answer was "don't ever touch it in a moist place" after they had me deregister and reboot and reregister the device...like that was going to clear this problem up. It is actually all they know how to tell you. The woman, whom I could barely understand, also wanted to know the last four digits of the credit card number purchasing the NOOK. But that didn't work...finally I realized she meant the number my wife had used to open the account...not the same number...it was a gift. When I did not have that she took our address as verification.

She said they had no record or notice of such a problem. She finally agreed to replace the Nook with a new one by post if I would give her a credit card number they can charge if we don't send the old unit back quickly enough.

But then I went out to my local B&N and tested my wet finger theory. I was able to successfully glitch all 6 NOOKcolor devices that I picked up and examined. A couple of fingers damp from the condensation on the outside of my iced coffee cup were enough to screw every single device up.

Conclusions

B&N has a serious problem with user experience because lots of people will read in a tub, touch it with wet or damp fingers, give it to their children to read (and we know kids are naturally walking wetnesses).
B&N are ignoring this problem or don't have testers sufficiently innovative enough to reproduce it.
B&N is wasting a lot of money on tech support people who can only tell you that you must deregister your device and reboot to see if it clears up a problem. This is indicative of very, very, poor design of both the device and the support protocol
B&N should take a page from Apple customer service. A few weeks ago they replaced an iPad with a broken screen for a developer friend of mine...no questions asked. And today they replaced my iPad rubber cover because it was peeling off the plastic substrate...no questions asked. THAT'S SERVICE.
If you have a NOOKcolor, do your best to avoid having any moisture on your fingers or on the device...a steamy bathroom is enough to trigger this

What Good is a Glass Promise

2010-11-01T15:10:00.002Z

I've recently been disenchanted with the miscellaneous claims of service being offered by a lot of businesses. In particular, drugstores and banks.

I tried to get a flu shot last month. It's a good thing to do, the cost is reasonable (although higher than it should be) and virtually every pharmacy and grocery store (with pharmacies) were advertising how easy t was to come in and get one.

It took me two hours

And it took visits to 5 pharmacies. In our neighborhood there are over a dozen top name pharmacies within a 5 minute drive. This includes Tom Thumb and Target.

Everyone had signs saying "no waiting", "get it when you want it", etc, etc indicating they were willing to immediately gratify my impulse to get protected from the flu. They are all offering the 3-antigen vaccine this year, and the prices ranged from 25 to 35 dollars. In Ireland they were free.

But, in reality I got responses (at 2pm on a Tuesday) like:

"Our pharmacist who gives them won't be in until after 6"
"Come back tomorrow, he's gone home already"
"Come back in an hour, we have to treat it like a prescription"
"We're not doing them today"

One place would have had me sit at their mini-clinic which is run like a doctor's office...there were 4 people in front of me with real complaints. That is OK, but not what the advertisement out front indicated.

Ultimately, I found a CVS where the pharmacist who gives them was on his first day and then even he discovered that the store was not quite ready to respond quickly...the injection supplies, such as gloves, swabs, alcohol, etc. were not in a central place for the delivery of shots. He , however, scoured the shelves in the store, gathered things together and managed to deliver the goods (left a hell of a bruise though).

I still had to wait 50 minutes in that pharmacy to receive the shot but 2/3 of that time was spent with the pharmacist trying to get my insurance to cover it. But since I had not begged permission from them first, and the pharmacist who is licensed to administer the shot without a doctor's order was not himself a doctor, the insurance declined it.

This was not totally unexpected since I assumed my insurance would not cover preventive measures...it just took up even more time.

I presume that the difference between the ads and the actal implementation, like the difference between a fast food ad photo and the delivered product, can be put down to marketing. But if a pharmacy is going to advertise the availability of a product or service on an ad hoc, walk in basis, they should be prepared to deliver. The notion of a sort of circuit or roving pharmacist moving from Walgreen's to Walgreen's or from CVS to CVS and being the only one capable of delivering the shot, seems outdated and bizarre.

Now on another note:
Today, I called a bank to verify that a check drawn on one of their accounts is good. I am told that they no longer verify funds. I must confess, I have not accepted a check for a purchase in a long time and so this may have been a service dropped years ago as banks ceased wanting to do business with we the people). They verified the account was open and active, but it is essentially a banking crap shoot as to whether you will incur a fee for depositing a bad check. I was offered the opportunity to drive 45 miles and present it in person to discover whether it is good or not.

Merchants, banks, governments, and service providers of all sorts need to remember that they are not our masters, we are their customers. Advertising a service as being available should mean it is really available...if not enough people take them up on it to make it viable to make it available all the time, then the sign should say, 'by appointment' not ''get it anytime'.

And the people who handle our money need to remember that it is actually OUR money and they are being entrusted with it...they are not granting us the boon of having them take our money...they are not our masters, they are our servers.

just a rant
Bill

PS the flu shot worked. Linda and I went to the state fair the following Saturday. By Monday she had the flu...I did not. Yes, Ikeep urging her to go get one.

Bill

Home Again -- A New Begining

2010-08-12T20:04:00.002+01:00

Well, after 4 years and some fascinating experiences, we have returned from Ireland to the US. we have, in fact, returned to our Dallas home.

DERI was fun, but funding was drying up (as could be expected in this economy) and I have been bitten by the entrepreneurial big again.

So, rather than do things halfway, I have started three new companies instead of just one.

SemantiStar, Inc. here in the US is a software product company focusing on knowledge sharing solutions for Enterprise. it is commercializing the eLearning platform we developed a few years ago at DERI, but targeting the emerging Mobile Knowledge Sharing market. We are porting the ideas from Pergamon to the enterprise and including mobile platforms such as the iPad from the outset.

SemantiFace, Ltd is an Irish company I have formed with one of my DERI colleagues, Mark Leyden, to develop visualization interface technology for semantic networks, social graphs, and other complex data visualization efforts.

NKA-Decker, Ltd is an Irish consulting company I have formed with my former director at DERI, Stefan Decker, to provide semantic technology consulting, training, and design.

Nothing like a fresh start!!

Life back in the US is good, but very hot now in TX...about 104 F today (40 C) ... but the sky is crystal clear and that blinding blue we have here in north Texas. Our house has survived 6 years of intermittent occupancy although we have no front lawn to speak of ... working to correct that.

Moving was a trick. It is amazing how much STUFF you can accumulate in 4 years in a small apartment. At least THIS time, I was present and Linda did not have to do it all.

All else is well and we look forward to getting things going and getting business off the ground.

I've been acquiring Apple equipment for development including several iPads. The iPad is a great device...not perfect, but excellent for its first release. However, mine went south this morning when the volume and rotate switches apparently developed a short, bug, or something which renders them useless while leaving the volume control image on the screen.

Apple has given me a 6.30 slot for the GENIUS BAR to examine it...not sure why they can't just replace it...there is absolutely nothing to be done about physical switch issues, I suspect.

The issue I have (aside from a 6 week old device developing a problem) is that it is just as we loaded our first app onto iPads. Also, Apple, who have been most professional to date, seemed more interested in sort of disclaiming the problem ("I can't recall ANY iPad coming back for a problem") than in just getting it fixed and letting me get on with my work.

Well, I must go talk to the bank now and to the post office...trying to get forwarded mail turned back to the original address is a real challenge sometimes.

Bill

stargate galactica must go

2009-10-26T23:50:00.003Z

I have tried to give it a chance, but Stargate Galactica ... uh I mean Stargate Universe must go.

Rush is a ludicrously annoying character poorly acted by Carlyle...someone should push him out an airlock. He seems to understand everything, but actually never has an answer to anything.

The soldiers do not follow chain of command and their CO is a wimp

The plots all resolve through a deus ex machina process or plot lines just get dropped...and the writing chores seem to consist of trying to find as many characters to yell, bluster, and scream as much as possible...the writers are apparently incapable of telling a story...the first three episodes are all the same plot.

The only interesting character...the only one you care about is Eli...he's the only one doing something while the others are shouting

The camera work is that crappy faux handheld stuff that bsg used and which just annoys

The Stargate franchise is suffering from this effort...hopefully they'll kill off half the cast and everyone will get more professional.

Just my thoughts
bill

a Suggestion for Recovery

2009-05-31T20:44:00.003+01:00

I have an idea for helping Ireland recover from the recession.

What Ireland needs is a big (really big) theme park. Ireland needs tourism and with the increasingly inclement weather, this week notwithstanding, a better reason will soon be needed than a trip to the Cliffs of Mohr.

But if a large amusement and theme park was properly designed and built it could attract a huge crowd of tourists and reinvigorate the tourist trade as well as the construction and contracting trade. It could also propmpt the creation of many new businesses in support of the construction, including manufacturing. Not to mention the hotels.

where do you put a big theme park in ireland?

NOT DUBLIN ... The land is too expensive and Dublin is inconvenient to much pf the rest of the country.

You put it in Athlone.

Athlone is beautifully situated ... 90 minutes from Dublin airport, 90 minutes from Galway and not much more from Limerick and Sligo.

Not to mention that it is about that from Galway Airport, Shannon airport, and Knock airport

Cork and Belfast are farther away, but not too bad

Now what would the theme be? I suggest Six Flags of Ireland ... Six flags is a large theme and water park conglomerate int the US ... The original Six flags over Texas commemorated the fact that Texas had six countries which ruled it at differnet periods of time. Spain, Mexico, France, US, Confederacy, and Texas itself (we are the 'Lone Star State' because we were a separate country from 1836 to 1845).

Ireland has certainly had plenty of rulers...it should be easy to list out six rulers that have played their part in Irish history. The rides and amusements could be designed to highlight these and to let the irish work out some of their historical resentment over invasion (as we do in Texas regarding the Mexican and Spanish invasions)

Now any such amusement park must be covered to some degree. The weather is just too wet for people from drier climates to enjoy outdoor amusements. Not the whole park, certainly, but carefully designed layout, walkways, and the odd clear dome would make for a very peasurable experience.

Educational exhibits can be added as well and even arcologies where unusual or out of season crops could be grown and sold.

All of this requires a lot of land, which does exist around Athlone, a lot of careful construction, the opportunity for utilising alternative energy sources like wind (of which there is a lot) and a great deal of money. But it can be built in stages, financed by joint commercial and government, and can be opened while still under construction. There would be plenty of oppportunities to build hotel complexes, exhibits, car parks, and to enhance the road and rail access to Athlone if not to put in a regional airport of its own.

Governmental tax breaks for the developers, similar to those given to Disney World would spur the development as well.

Obviously, there will be issues and a tendency to say such a project is too expensive now during recession...but now may be the time to do this. After the recession, costs and prices will rise. People will be better able to travel and will be looking for relief from the dreariness of the recessionary period. They will be looking for diversions as their incme comes back up .. i don't just mean the Irish...I am talking about people from all over the world who will be looking for a new leisure diversion, a new vacation spot wher they can also jump off to visit the historical and natural sites of a country they have not been to before.

Building a theme park now would cost less as deflation takes effect and wages can be negotiated to be a bit lower. Then, as the recession lifts, the park will just be opening, all bright and shiny and new. And still under construction of course.

I'll leave it to better trained people than me to work out the details, but I think Ireland, if it wants to re-invigorate the Tiger, needs to investigate alternative economic solutions and an interesting, world class amusement park on a scale to compete with Disneyland Paris and coordinated with Irish-wide tourism using Athlone as a central jumping off spot is an idea to be considered.

Bill

Theory vs Observation -- Philosophy of Science

2009-02-19T14:42:00.003Z

There are essentially two ways of conducting research ... OK, everything can be made binary.

But in this respect, I am talking about what I am starting to call Theory-based research and Experiment-based research ... and I am thinking specifically about IT research.

Theory-based research involves determining an idea or a structure, learning the state of the art, then forming a new theory, perhpas expressed mathematically. Then, in computer science (computing science, web science, IT?) an instantiation of the theory may be created (i.e. a program). The program, however, is a demonstration of the theory in practice...what is desired is already known, the outcome pre-determined (if the theory was fully thought out)

Experiment-based research involves determining an idea or structure, learning the state of the art, then constructing experiments and observing the results. The theory is developed later, from generalizing observations and deriving rules based on them. The program created is the experiment and its outcomes are not known because the point of the exercise is to see what happens.

Both approaches are valid and science mores forward due to both. The first method is more deductive and the second more inductive, although these are somewhat arbitrary descriptions.

Experiment-based research is more to do with engineering in its purest sense as it expects to iteratively refine a design and to discover a rule through observation. Theory-based research is more to do with mathematics and thought experiments, any engineering being, to some degree, superfluous to the point of the research.

They are two sides of the same coin, attempts to come at ideas and discover truths in different manners and each approach has its strengths and weaknesses.

I am fascinated by emergent behaviour in systems. Emergent behaviour is systems is very hard to explore (perhaps impossible to explore) apriori via theory. The 'system' must be created and allowed to operate to observe emergent behaviour...by its very nature, emergent behaviour cannot be predicted, although it can be encouraged.

Consequently, most of my research is experiment-based ... build it and truths will come. I like that approach. it feels more ... satisfying ... to me.

regards
bill

The Weak and the Strong

2009-02-10T17:20:00.004Z

I've begun using the terms Weak Semantics and Strong Semantics to help people understand the difference and the application state of the art. The terms are obviously derived from Weak and Strong AI discussions. The terms have been used before but not, i think, in quite this way.

Weak Semantics are Flickr tags ... simple taxonomic annotation
Strong Semantics are fully constituted ontologically complete triple stores

WEAK----------------------------------------------------------STRONG

Applications in the world are somewhere along a continuum between weak and strong. Most of the tagging applications and a lot of the social networking apps we are seeing and working on today fall on the weaker side of the middle of the scale.

Research efforts have typically deal with stronger semantics which ae harder to implement and manage. In particular they are hard to get performance out of.

I've noticed that more and more of our efforts fall on the left side of the scale. They are easier to understand by our partners, easier to implement, and quicker to show results. Butthe time will come for efforts on the right side of the scale. There has to be a committment to solving very hard problems with semantics to get there though and they take a long time.

Bill

Cool news

2009-02-07T01:06:00.003Z

I learned last night that my book, Critical Mass: A Primer for Living with the Future, co-authored with my long time friend and business partner, Pat McGrew, is being used at a University to explain how technolgoy got to where it is.

That's very cool news.

Critical Mass is a collection of essays written in 2000 on how several aspects of technology would evolve over the next few years. We looked at and extrapolated things like electronic paper, DRM, politics with technology and several other aspects of day to day life.

I re-read it a few months ago and it holds up pretty well...I am happy to be able to say. Pat and I saw a certain inevitability of direction for technologies that were just emerging or on the horizon then and most everything evolved in the directions very similar to those we predicted.

To hear that it is being used now with a historical perspective makes me feel a bit old, but quite happy.

Bill

Critical mass is available at http://mc2books.com/ or from Amazon

Edupunk -- Subversive eLearning

2008-10-18T23:57:00.004+01:00

Edupunk: What a perfect term for what we intend.
A new word, coined by Jim Groom in May of this year in his blog http://bavatuesdays.com/

Web 2.0 offers us an opportunity to view the educational landscape from the chaotic perspective. Educational technologies that incorporate and embrace the complexity and chaoticism of the web, the structural ambiguity of collective intelligence.

There is a very articulate article on mapping new technologies onto existing pedagogical theories
in the Ariadne Journal, titled New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies by Gráinne Conole, and it has some interesting insights on how the new web technologies map onto behaviorism, constructivism and situated learning, but I think it misses the point somehow.

Punk was a musical rebellion against the arisen norm. The arisen norm of even the rebellious 60's had become complacent in the sedentary seventies. Punk addressed this with anger, and a complete disrespect for the mores of the day.

Cyberpunk arose as a rebellion and a repudiation of the technologist's dream...a recognition that these wonderful technologies that had grown up and created a type of priesthood could be subverted by individuals working in garages and the back alleys of grubby neighborhoods.

Steampunk came not long after, less in anger than in celebration. Victorian technology was, perhaps, the last technology that an individual could create in his own workshop which might change the world. That is until the nineties when cyberpunk technology once again handed that power to individuals.

All these punk movements share the defining element of punk...a Do It Yourself attitude, a rejection of formalizations and an embracing of chaos to live on the edge, balanced between anarchy and structure.

Edupunk embraces this same spirit. it embraces a DIY method of learning, a collective intelligence and interactivity with a community of learners. It seeks to provide an engaging model for students to create their own curricula, their own learning path, and ultimately their own content.

This is what we are trying to encourage in elearning in our lab at DERI. We are trying to find the way to enable learners to interact with each other, to connect with experts who can pass on the 'real' information as opposed to the 'correct' information.

Ultimately this punk'd approach to learning, the notion that learners will educate themselves and develop their own content, their own paths, their own mappings and roadmaps is very threatening to more established and formalized (formulaic) learning scenarios.

Edupunk may be a misunderstood term and may not fully emerge as a valid term. But it captures the flavor of what learning is undergoing in the way of change and evolution. Web 2.0 technologies and our own semantic technologies make possible the punk process, the DIY nature, the disrespectful disregard for practice within the learning milieu.

Edupunk: it's what learning's all about ... Now.

eLearning Strength here in Ireland

2008-07-30T18:29:00.004+01:00

I was having a conversation with our University President, Jim Browne, the other day and he made the comment that he was surprised to learn how significant elearning is to the Irish economy.

It's true. elearning is one of those industries that sit quietly, growing over many years, then suddenly awakens as it crosss that knee in the curve of interest and value. elearning is rapidly becoming not only a major industry here in ireland, but also a major interest and infrastructure in other industries. check out http://brainpower.ie/2008_03_01_archive.html

Many of the consumers of irish elearning expertise are US companies, which provides a very healty multiplier for the market strength. and, as the world becomes more and more global, the expansion of elearning companies in ireland to the entire globe is virtually assured.

As elearning comes to be understood as a wide ranging activity, the scope of which is truly global when the web is utilized, it will rise in importance. Much of our own work here in the elearning cluster has been focused on the use of informal knowledge acquisition and gathering via web-based social networkign tools.

We begin to understand elearning as any form of research, info gathering, querying, and knowledge acquisition facilitaed through digital media including the web, hypertext, video, audio, data visualizations, normal text, electronic paper, mobile devices, and virtual realities.

Our own Siobhan Dervan has just completed her masters project which involved creating a virtual version of a real live place for children to learn about plants and animals, particularly gaden denizens. her Brigit's Virtual Garden is constructed (executed, instantiated, pick the word) in second life.

Linden Labs, the creators and operators of Second Life have identified learning as one of the prime business models in virtual worlds. They have a page about it and their business model at http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/07/24/my-first-two-months-at-linden-lab/

The inworld economy of Second Life is 330 Milion US dollars. I've been exploring and playing around with Second Life myself lately and it seems that when a bunch of people come together they will do three things
Buy
Sell
Fornicate

And the first thing they buy and sell is the fornication

I don't see this as a problem. It is human nature and Second Life gives us strong insights into how people build their world when given ultimate freedom to do so.

Second Life is not all about Buying, sellign an Sex, however. Shortly after people form a community, they start building and creating pother things. and they start talking, and talking, and talking. They converse on all topics. In second life, though, that chat can be augmetned with visual, 3d examples.

So chem labs, physics labs, history projects, literature, and all other areas of normal human life are represented, explored, and learned about.

Second Life is going to evolve and expand. They do have problems, but it will probably become one of the most widely used venues for education in the near future. Learning is easier in Second Life for many things. simulations, feedback, analysis, exploration and other facets of learnign can be pursued and made available in ways that traditional learnign can't. we have yet to see seriously radical educational experiments in SL, but they will emerge. And I expect SL to drive the demand for more bandwidth, more processing power and more computing cpaabilities. I was experimenting with the difference between laptops running the SL viewer and a high end graphics machine doing so. It is as one might expect, phenomenal.

which means a grwoing nterest in using SL for anything, education, shopping, simulation, training, sex, communication, or anything else will drive a demand for more, cheaper, graphics power with better bandwidth, particularly to the home and on mobile devices. Demand drives innovation and innovation provides new products and services. voila!

So elearning is vitally important to Ireland's economy and in deed to the economy and probably the future of many companies and other endeavours. Watch this virtual space.

regards
Bill

Darklight Festival Panel - Future of the Web

2008-06-30T21:22:00.003+01:00

Had a very nice time Friday at the Darklight film festival in Dublin. I was invited to sit on a panel discussing the future of the web, web 3.0, and whatever that means.

Axel Polleres, a colleague from here at DERI, came with me and sat on the panel as well. We had quite a lively discussion, including a digression with Chris Howard of IBM on virtual reality, the emerging 3D Internet, and my own notion that virtual reality and true reality will begin to merge in both perception and importance for our children or grand children.

The audience seemed to mostly be creatives who were either filmmakers, film aficionados, or film students. things began to get a bit lively when I mentioned that I thought one of the effects of ubiquitous, pervasive and highly realistic virtual worlds would be that gender would become fluid; people would choose their genders on both sides of the virtual divide based on whim and how they wanted to be perceived.

After our discussion, which ran about 30 minutes longer than it was supposed to, I was interviewed by intruders.tv ( http://ie.intruders.tv/ ). Don't know when it will appear on the web site but it should be soon. The interviewer had to do some editing because it took him four tries to get his intro recorded cleanly.

I think the one thing that came clear in the discussion is that the technology is not all that important. there is a certain inevitability about improved graphics, deeper immersion, easier access, and everywhere connectivity. The true challenge is in assessing the impact of such social connectivity on our culture and ultimately on our species. The changes that this level of real immersion into virtual realities can bring about are dramatic.

All in all a nice day

Viral Culture - Mono- and Multi-

2008-05-19T16:43:00.006+01:00

The subject of American culture came up the other day. Actually, one of my staff here in Ireland made a bit of a joke about it:
Question: What's the difference between America and Yogurt?
Answer: After 400 years Yogurt would develop a culture!

It's actually quite a cute joke and I laughed hardest...but then I came back with, "If we have no culture in America, why are folks on this side of the Atlantic so keen on importing it?"

He had to concede that there was truth in the implication.

First, let me be clear: No offense was intended or taken by either party to this little dialog. We joke about our respective cultures around here a lot.

But I started thinking about it. We Americans actually take a lot of ribbing for our so-called lack of culture...from the French, the Germans, the Belgians, the English, the Irish, and it seems, everyone else in the world. We are constantly told that America has no culture. I've heard this off and on for 30 years of traveling the globe. I've never given it much thought beyond the "oh yeah, then why do you keep importing our fast food" stage.

And then I think I came to a sudden realization the other day:

The reason America seems to have no culture to other parts of the world is that we don't have A culture...rather, our name is Legion, for we are many (please feel free to insert snide biblical comment here).

When we look abroad, Americans see Irish culture, English culture, French culture, Japanese culture...all nicely monolithic. In fact, one can describe it as seeing a monoculture (to borrow a term from agribusiness)

But when you look at the US, you see eastern culture, midwest culture, california culture, southern culture, Mexican-American culture, African-American culture, Japanese-American culture, Chinese-American culture, Italian-American culture, German-American culture and Irish American culture. To name just a few ... go to Minnesota and discover Scandinavian-American culture...drill down a bit and discover Norwegian-American culture versus Swedish-American culture.

These are more than just politically correct ethnic labels. They attempt, perhaps clumsily, to capture the amazing and improbable fusion of a distinctly US culture (with its fascination for mobility and fast food, casualness and aggressiveness) and the culture of peoples who came into the US bringing and preserving aspects of their original culture. The result is a strange metamorphosis that is understandably difficult for outside observers to grasp.

Tex-Mex food is NOT, repeat NOT, Mexican food. Tex-Mex culture is NOT Mexican culture. it is a synthesis of two tastes, flavor sets, attitudes and points of view to create a third point of view that is new and different.

It is culture imported, sampled, modified, re-contextualized, and shot back at you. And consequently, there is so much of it, in myriad combinations, that it can be hard to see and recognize.

Our US culture is so Multi- that recognition of it is an NP-hard problem, perhaps. And when we look at other nations and cultures, we see an interesting, entertaining, but ultimately mono- culture. This is not necessarily a fair assessment, but, seen through American eyes, each country seems very ethnocentric in style and language and music and art and thought.

As compared to the diversity of culture I have to consume and respond to in a city such as San Jose, CA where there literally is no ethnic majority, walking down the street in Galway is a purely Irish experience, not a japanese-indonesian- mexican-californian-american one.

Galway prides itself on being culturally diverse as evidenced at a major parade this year and that is true. And it is very accepting and inclusive of other cultures, but the volume is so much greater in the US that it is suddenly understandable to me why non-Americans look across our land and fail to see an identifiable American culture. Is it Disneyland? Or Chicago? Las Cruces or Las Vegas? Salem, MA or Salem, OR?

All I can say to my friends on this side of the Atlantic is that you must look for an American Culture in the bizareness of our being. we ARE Tex-Mex and Philly Cheese Steak, Grunge and C&W, McDonald's and The Four Seasons, KFC and Sardi's.

We are the Kennedy Center and the Caesar's Palace, Falling Water by Frank Loyd Wright and Dancing Frogs in Carl's Corners.

So when you say America has no culture, what you mean is that it has no single culture. What it has, my friend, after 400 years, is myriad cultures, blended, stirred, sliced, diced, confused, and convoluted. Actually, it's a bit like that Yogurt would be; chaotic and VERY messy.

But a hell of a lot of people around the world seem to want a piece of it...and we happily export it. So feel free to take it up, import it, sample it, modify it, re-contextualize it, then shoot it back at us...and we will build a neighborhood around it.

ain't it cool?

Bill

Transparency and Fair Rights

2008-04-07T16:24:00.002+01:00

Long time between posts...sorry. I am doing fine and feeling great for those who recall I had a stem cell transplant last year. Things are progressing nicely on all fronts right now, work is good and picking up and my energy levels are high so I am finally catching up on some writing.

The subject of ISPs selling my internet traffic along with all those companies that track it via cookies, etc came up today. I have some thoughts on this below.

Sounds to me as if two things need to happen

1) laws imposed to protect users by returning ownership to their information to them. Information about where they go and what they do should be held in trust by the ISP's and other entities

2) fair rights management should be put in place to digitally encode the fair rights policy each user establishes for their information use. This is the goal of the work Slawek has been doing here in eLearning. Not just digital rights around an object like a picture, but rather fair rights of any node on a network, including the person represented in a FOAF network.

Of course absolutely nothing will prevent governments from intercepting and spying on private communications when they deem it necessary or justifiable (in the broadest terms). The use of ultra-secure encryption by private citizens would, I am certain, be considered probable cause for a warrant compelling the user to unlock the encryption, so even that route is not going to be secure.

The best defense is probabilistic obscurity...the notion that there is so much traffic that no government can or will seek to intercept everything and as long as you are not engaged in illicit activities at the national security level, you will probably be ignored even if they do happen to intercept your communications. As an example, the TSA do not publish lists of what they find in travelers' luggage no matter how embarrassing or lucrative that might be. And agencies DO typically react when it is revealed their employees have done so, such as in the case of the contractor's looking at candidates passport info in the US.

For normal traffic, citizens demanding better protection of their data from ISPs and corporations will remain the only viable barrier...so there has to be speaking up and out.

David Brin wrote that the only secure policy is one of total transparency..If I can learn as much about a national leader as he or she can learn about me they will show a natural reticence to pry into my life.

Bill

Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T19:33:00.000Z

Here we are back in the US for Thanksgiving.

I have had several questions from Irish friends and colleagues about Thanksgiving and it got me to thinking about this quintessentially American holiday.

Thanksgiving is becoming the most important US holiday because, i think, it addresses our need for a holiday that is all inclusive, non-religious, that celebrates family (whatever that means to you). We take a certain amount of flack about the amount of food we consume on this day since it is essentially a holiday for eating, but what other activity is so disctinctly human and sharing than food.

Few elements of the human condiiton are as universal as eating. Sitting down to a meal with friends and family is a key psychological bonding event. In many cultures, being invited to share a meal is an indication of acceptance and trust far exceeding any other.

We also take a lot of flack about the commercial aspects of our holidays, how the big sales start on the day after Thanksgiving and how much we spend on things at this time of year.

But to this i respond, "What should we do instead?" If we all stopped buying gifts to give then much of our workforce would be put out of jobs. retailers make it into the black each year because of the holiday season sales. without that, the economy of the US would literally be devastated.

But back to Thanksgiving. It is a holiday invented by the Lincoln administration, later coopted to spur sales, but uniquely egalitarian in its appeal. It celebrates in a sense the most common of human elements, the need for family and the need for sustenance.

We are long past the time when our thanks are for successful harvests. Sufficient food to feed ourselves for the next year is a givien in this day and age. We give thanks now for many things, family, health, propsperity, survival. But being thankful for culinary bounty is still a part of the holiday, still a comforting thought even in a day of always plentiful food.

Thanksgiving is a comfortable holiday (with its attendant family dramas and squabbles, of course) and I heartilly recommend it to anyone who has never tried it. At a time when we as a people are more and more divided by small things, this generic holiday of just being thankful for what you have, of seeing family and friends, of indulging in a good meal wth all its concomitant endorphins, this holiday is one the world can share. It is an intrinsically human holiday.

If you don't have a thanksgiving holiday in your part of the world, I strongly recommend you get one soon!

Bill

A New Thought on Time

2007-10-30T00:11:00.000Z

I was contemplating the nature of time the other day and trying to turn relativity on its head. It occurred to me that it might be possible to restate the Lorentz transformation (the time dilation effect) in terms of quantum time and avoid the necessity of thinking of time as a fourth dimension.

Time does not seem to be a fourth dimension to me. We cannot move in it, cannot change pour position along the dimension and are much more aware of travelling along it than other dimensions While standing still on earth seems stationary, we are actually travelling in all three spatial dimensions relative to the sun and other stars but are unaware of it. Time passing, however, we are aware of as long as we are conscious (and actually even when we aren't) , But we cannot translate along the time line...neither forward nor back. It is much more as if time 'flows' under us rather than we travel along it.

If we want to discard this notion of time as a fourth dimension, we must still deal with the dilation effect...it is, after all, demonstrable and real. But the mathematics of dealing with it are just a theoretical representation. The interpretation is that time moves more slowly for a faster moving body.

If, however, we consider time as quantized into units (commonly called chronons) then we might take a different interpretation perhaps increased speed causes a body moving through space to skip chronons, literally jumping across moments in time. Since a body could age only during these chronons, these quantized intervals of time, the effect of skipping a few would be to delay aging, to slow down time with respect to the moving body.

I am not sure how to test this. It should be possible to determine if time dilation actually occurs in quantized steps, but measuring events in the 10E-35 seconds range is just a bit difficult. But I do believe that looking at time as a more fundamental quantity than the spatial dimensions makes sense. Time IS different and not just our perception of it. I suspect we will not make great strides in theoretical physics again until we change our point of view on this.

Of course all aspects of time-dependent effects we measure now must be accounted for in any new model that changes the interpretation of time. But understanding time as a substrate for existence (anything that exists must exists for some minimum amount of time) could significantly change our understanding of cosmological structure and events.

There are new theories of physics which are trying to go beyond the horizons that even string theory have painted. Loop quantum gravity treats time in a different fashion than traditional physics. While I have a certain appreciation for M-Theory and its associated Branes, LQG is the first theory I've seen that seems to truly try to interpret time as more fundamental than space.

Another, somewhat random, thought occurred to me in thinking about all this. Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have both proven very useful in the last century. but General Relativity has not proven very useful in the day to day world. QM gives us semiconductors, electronics, and lasers...soon quantum computing. special relativity gives us accurate GPS systems 9among other things). But GR has been less helpful. While quite beautiful and very well demonstrated, it just has not provided the real world benefits one would have expected of a theory of gravity (anti-gravity for example). And, cosmologically, it has become something of an embarrassment. Its irreconcilability with QM is becoming increasingly problematic. We need a new theory of gravity which delivers usable effects as well as explanations.

Thoughts?
Bill

Frightenly poor service from NTL

2007-09-07T18:18:00.000+01:00

I just had my UPC DVR installed today and had to comment.

NTL's installer was 2 hours late and then disappeared for another hour because he showed up at my door and did not have the box. While he was gone (without telling us he was leaving) , NTL told me he was not qualified to do the install, the sales person had scheduled the wrong installer, and I would have to wait 24 hours more...

This was just before the installer showed up again and performed the install. Somebody had their head up a very dark place!

With regards to the box itself, this is, at best, a poorly designed, haphazard, crippled toy of a DVR. (The company should not even be allowed to use the term DVR for such a box)

The lack of recording a series is pitiful. This is a basic function of DVRs...to process and parse the schedule. My NTL installer told me it was because SKY owns the copyright for this feature..I presume he made that up.

The volume control on my remote does not function ... nor the mute ... this post implies it must know about the TV...but there is no manual with the device and I haen't found the user guide on the website that is mentioned.

The on/off button for on and the UPC button for on is STUPID...the symbol on the top button is the internationally recognized symbol for ON and OFF in a single button. The failure to put page up and down functions in other pieces of the navigation software is AMATEURISH, the use of the STOP button to unmark a show for recording is POOR DESIGN and the remote is UNCOMFORTABLE to hold, particularly if you have arthritis. The wasp shape of the TIVOs and the Logitech Harmony were chosen for a reason.

The Back button is OK, but why not make it sizable like the OK button?

The menu system seems to have been designed by a team of chimps...there is no logic to it, no usability and only one accessibility feature...sort of. The help button accesses one screen with a short description of four buttons.The preferences and settings could all be collected in a single screen. The three clicks to find your recorded progremmes.

Sorry for the harsh review, but I own 3 TIVOs in the US and they set a very high bar of quality. Any professional software development team could have done better than the mish mash of functions and features offered by this box.

NTL needs to be seriously educated in the meaning of quality and the customer support people need ot stop making up stories to cover for their installers. Actually, they probably just need to go out of business and be replaced entirely.

Bill

Stem Cell transplant

2007-08-19T14:00:00.000+01:00

Well, I have had my stem cell transplant and lived to blog it.

I went in on tuesday evening and wednesday was taken into radiology for the insertion of my hickman line...this is the line that kinked the first time I came in and had to be removed. This time it went in very smoothly. It has stayed in operation and is unpainful...a bit itchy sometimes. It is a three lumen (exit) tube that allows for multiple draws and deliveries in and out of my major chest vein. It can be left in indefinitely (whenever asked how long the usual time is, the doctors and nurses get this gleam in their eye and reply, "it can be indefinite.") but is not a sexy borg silver color...pasty white with red, yellow, and blue colored taps.

Next day was chemo day. As such, the procedure is pretty easy...I took a recommendation from a US source and chewed ice chips during the actual high dose chemotherapy delivery. This, coupled with the mouthwashes they give you, has seemed to save me the agony of mouth ulcers and esophageal ulcers Mucositis they call it.

However nothing saved me from the nausea...the one thing i dreaded most was not having it under control and it has not been. I was ill twice the same evening as chemo, and we (doctors, nurses, and me) have been working the problem since. Finally, a motorized infusion pump of nasuon (sp) coupled with cyclizine twice a day seems to be working.

The good news came yesterday when i was told my counts were on their way up again. Then, this evening, I was told I can go home...my counts have returned to normal and the transplant has been a success...i don't need any antibiotics or significant aftercare...basically, it's over

I still have to get past the last of the nausea, but i seem to be ready to go home to recover.

hair has strarted to fall out this afternoon.. just the grey this time right now.

so, home in a day or so and then a couple weeks recovery then back to the office...looking forward to it.

oh yeah, somewhere in the process they have to pull the hickman out!

regards
bill

I've got Cancer...is it my fault?

2007-07-17T17:34:00.000+01:00

So Next Wednesday I will check ino the hospital to have my cancer treated.

For those of you who do not know, I was disagnosed with Multiple Myeloma last year and have been undergoing drug and chemo therapy for it. i am now about to undergo a Stem Cell Transplant where blood stem cells harvested in January will be returned to me after I undergo a high dose of chemotherapy to kill off my entire immune system.

This has been a hell of a year, trying to move to Ireland, get settled into a new job, and get treatment for this silly disease for which I've been lucky enough to have no symptoms, dealing with an ongoing case of pneumonia that has made walking and stair climbing unpleasant...caused by the reduction of my immune system which is part of the treatment, not necessarily part of the illness. But, here we are and, with this SCT, I hope to be in complete remission.

But what I wanted to talk about in this posting was the reaction some people have given me. I was surprised and, to be honest, somewhat dismayed.

Some people have questioned whether my cancer is 'lifestyle related' ... the implicit assumption being that somehow I am responsible for the disease because i do not live a 'healthy enough' life.

Well, first, there is NO scientific evidence for lifestyle having ANYTHING to do with Multiple Myeloma. It appears to be either a disease genetically inherited or prompted by random events as one ages. I subscribe to the 'stray cosmic ray' theory, but my mother had a related disease, lymphoma, so who knows.?

Secondly, let's consider what constitutes a healthy lifestyle. I do not exercise much, I am a bit overweight (130 kg or 270 lbs at 187 cm or 6'2") but I do not smoke (and never have), seldom drink and typically no more than a single beer at a time, and, prior to becoming ill, I walked 3 mils a day for 2 years, I typically eat my 5-a-day fruit and veg (often more), drink about 2-3 liters of water, coffee, or tea a day, drink decaf tea with all those anti-oxidants every evening, and take a multi-vitamin each morning. Yes, I eat red meat, but intermix it with a lot of chicken and pork and fish. I prefer a variety of food and flavours which means i eat a wide variety of things over the course of the week.

I meditate regularly, but do not practice yoga or a martial arts form. I am happy to say that my health has recently returned to a point where I can start walking routinely again. Of course, Galway weather does not lend itself to vast amounts of enjoyable, dry walking. I work a lot, but read for hours each day (leisure reading) and watch a lot of TV. I enjoy relaxing weekends and two week vacations, but also try to relax when I travel as well. And I love to travel.

So, do I lead a healthy lifestyle or not? In the 18 months since I was diagnosed, I have NEVER been told by any of my multitudinous doctors to lose weight or change my lifestyle at all.

Many people I talk to tell me i should be eating organic foods and many have recommended odd lifestyle changes which seem ludicrous to me. They also recommend a bunch of self-help and self-health books but I find such books boring and contradictory.

BTW, what does 'organic food' really mean? All food is organic. The term seems to be reserved now for food that is grown without fetilizers other than 'natural' ones like manure. For me, I find 'organic' foods to be smaller, less tasty, and more expensive than 'non-organic' foods. Frankly, give me the fertilized food over the food grown in shit.

Also, those growth hormones in US beef? hey, worked for me...I'm 6 foot 2! Actually, those hormones and the antibiotices in our US meats are typically helping to cut down on food borne disease and many are also broken down by cooking processes. The incidence of stomach cancer has fallen dramatically since the inclusion of preservatives in food became common.

When was the last time you heard of a case of trichinosis from rare pork? WrongDiagnosis.com lists the annual incidence at

"approx 1 in 22,666,667 or 0.00% or 11 people in USA."

That is mostly due to the use of antibiotics in pork feed.

So, I am sorry, but I see virtually NO value in 'ORGANIC' foods over AgriBusiness foods. and I like BIG grapefruits, BIG Peaches, and cheap vegetables. particularly ones that don't I feel safe eating.

Another BTW, I, like most, eat a lot of potatoes, but i try to NOT make them my only veg. I enjoy spinach, green beans, asparagus, peas, black eyed peas, lima beans, corn, and manny other vegetables. Linda nad I were talking recently and realized that our variety of veg exceeds that of others we know by quite a lot.

So, I do not believe lifestyle has anything to do with my illness. For some, yes...lung cancer FROM smoking is an established fact...but don't suggest Dana Reeve should have changed HER lifestyle...she never smoked a day in her life. (http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/03/07/reeve.obit/index.html)

But what confuses me is the large number of people who WANT lifestyle to have something to do with it. Of course, that provides a thing to hang blame on...to point a finger at and say, "that's why"...but those are false hopes. there are often no reasons...just the randomness of a universe driven by chance.

45% of men and 39% of women in the world will develop cancer at sometime in their life...his means YOU. Of course, cancer is the thing that gets us now because we survive most everything else here in western society...and even cancer is becoming more and more curable or manageable daily. My own will be pushed into remission with a stem cell transplant next week, and then I will manage it as an occassionally annoying chronic disease...hopefully for many long years.

So, before you self righteously think, "oh, they lead an unhealthy lifestyle" when you hear of a person aflicted with cancer, heart disease, or many other ailments, remember that, for many, the problems are not in their lives, but in their genes. And maybe in yours.

Bill

The Value of Heroes

2007-06-28T22:35:00.000+01:00

My nephew Steven was visiting us recently and we were watching some TV. The subject turned to heroes and whether there was something happening in TV, Film, and Comics. And, in an unrelated but perhaps synchronistic event, I exchanged some email with Jason Ohler http://www.jasonohler.com/ on the value of storytelling in learning. That set me to thinking about whether something MIGHT be happening.

Storytelling when I was a young adult was fairly simple stuff. The stories were, of course, in books, movies, and TV. That has not much changed. But, the depth and structure of those stories from the 1940's, -50's, and -60's, when you go back and look at it critically, were very shallow Despite some amazing work which pushed literature forward, even when I go back and look at some of the most important stories of those times, I find a simplicity of structure, a lack of depth, and even a naivete that went unnoticed and uncommented upon during that time.

TV and movies were in their infancy then and it is perhaps to be expected that their storytelling skills were not as evolved. Oh, I know, Citizen Kane is STILL considered the best movie ever made, but for heaven's sake, it was Welles ... what can you do? Heterosis had to occur in somebody...we were just lucky enough for it to be Orson.

But the run of the mill film, even those we consider classics now, are, under the electron microscope of 21st century expectations, rather anemic story and structure wise.

Fast forward to the nineties and some very interesting thngs are happening. first, WE WON! Those of us who fought teachers, parents, grandparents, scout masters, teacher, nun, and every other "authority figure" of the 50's and 60's who told us those horrible comic books would rot our brains and seduce the innocent. We won and the graphic novel has emerged as a legitimate literary form.

2007-06-03T20:57:00.000+01:00

Found Picturetrail recently and it's great. It let's you build small display widgets with your own photos then embed them onto your own websites...very cool.

Other technology that's begining to shw up includes Microsoft's Surface, a computing table that is almost a one for one match to some of the ideas I wrote about here a couple years ago. It's good to see some of these things finally appearing but I still think the actual usage model is developing.

Microsoft wants to make $5k-$10k tables a standard sort of approach. Not a bad idea, but the price is too high. I think smaller form factors, simpler implementations and lower costs will be important to making surface computing more ubiquitous.

I've been asked to provide a keynote this week to a learning technolgy conference and I think this technology of touch and feel and manipulation is one of the key ones emerging right now. But it's not just a matter of lookig at your photos, or moving things around on a table with your fingers. it is about being able to manipulate a world that exists around you. it's about computing splashed on the walls.

For learning, this means access to information, knowledge, training, expertise, advice, and ideas all the time, spashed onthe walls and tables, on the surfaces that surround you.

I think that is the promise of so called surface computing (look back at my old entry on a new theory of surfaces), not these simple photo sharing apps we see in the MS Surface marketing vids.

But the technology is coming along nicely. Microsoft's is intriguing, but Apple's may be better. And we are experimenting with our own here at DERI.

Bill

The Darkling Plane

2007-04-20T02:06:00.000+01:00

Much has happened this week. I feel I shoulld write about the events at Virginia Tech, should offer some thoughts and reactions.

But I find I have little to say. The events are, of course, horrific. The news coverage is, of course, pornographic. The "manifesto" is, of course, "rambling". The killer was, of course, a loner. Nothing is very different from previous massacres.

There are questions, of course. But I am constantly reminded of two songs: Jeremy by Pearl Jam, written about 16 year old Jeremy Delle, a student at a Richardson, TX high school who killed himself in class and I Don't Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats about 16 year old Brenda Spencer who sat in her room across from a school and fired her new rifle at the playground.

Specifically, the lines "Jeremy spoke in class today" from Jeremy and "And he can see no reasons / 'Cos there are no reasons / What reason do you need to die, die?" from I Don't Like Mondays.

The events occurred 12 years apart, in 1991 and 1979 respectively.

There are no reasons behind such events. Indeed there is unreason, the absence of reason, the dark void of rationality, a darkling plane of anger, hurt, fear, emptiness.

The victims are tragic, the famlies left behind are deeply bereft and it is only natural to ask why. But there truly are no reasons. A young man descended into the darkness of madness and the word 'reason' does not apply.

At least this time there can be no claim of "we didn't know", "no one ever suspected", he was such a quiet boy", etc, etc. This man was known to be ill, he was known to be disturbed, and many people DID try to get him help and to protect the world from his growing anger. But in vain. The rules and the laws, and the circumstances worked against the possibility of stopping him. But at least some people in his life tried.

There are heroes in this story. The 72 year old professor who gave his life so 20 of his students could escape; a true hero of the people. The survivors who aided fallen friends. There will be more stories of heroes as we learn more. But these events show, once again, heroes are not special, they have no 'powers'. They are ordinary people who perform extraordinary feats in a crisis...and some pay the ultimate price.

And there was a villain as well. But we should also mourn him. His descent into madness must have been intensely painful and lonely. He is a victim as well; a victim of something in his brain that took him onto that darkling plane. No condoning here, no excuses. But a realization that this was an illness which, had it been recognized when the chance to do so presented itself, 33 people would still be alive.

But there are no reasons. What reason do you need?

Bill

Nerds and Visions

2007-03-22T23:09:00.000Z

I was invited to deliver a lecture recently for the Arts Faculty here at NUIG and my title was Learning to be Human: Why Nerds Need the Humanities. I hope my audience enjoyed it. I made it informal but tried to get across the notion that we nerds (those of us who willingly devote our lives to the pursuit of technological knowledge and seek total enlightenment and fullfillment through the deeper undersanding of technical issues) need the study of art, history, philosophy and the other humanities because without those subjects, we have no context within which to place our tech.

The talk went well and I, at least, had fun. The subject is acctually vital because our universities around the world have begun allowing satudents to focus and concentrate so much in singel areas such as IT, medicine, engineering, etc, that the students thus turned out do not have to have a braoder cultural literacy within which to place their knowledge and emotions. i would say that they were, consequently, not fully human...they have not learned to BE human. And it is their loss as well as that of the world.

My talk went round to th esubject of how you teach art, history, etc to such nerds as we now sow among our classes and culture. Given that the world truly changed 25 years ago with the invention of the personal computer, that THIS device truly CHANGES how generations of future people will view the world, then we need different ways, i contend, to teach these same old stories from history and literature.

Jane Austen doesn't work anymore for a lot of students; her novels are timeless and pertinent but not contextual enough to resonate at first blush. the movie Clueless, however, might work better.

The other aspect of this, I believe, is that our stories, our literacy, our timeless learned messages are about heores. You can HAVE stories abotu other things, but the importnat stories, the ones that teach us to be human are, interestingly enough, about heroes.

Those who know me will, by now, have figured out that I then talked about today's mythiical heroes and of course that meant Buffy, Batman, Superman, Skywalker, and the others.

Out of all this, I think there is a message evolving that I want to discuss in more depth. That is the message of how we teach and how we help students learn these messages. Not just WHAT we teach (although this is vital) but HOW we teach an what we use to teach with.

Enter a new invitation. I have been invited to present a keynote to the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) June conference here at NUIG. I've been giving this one a lot of thought in the light of this mesaage that I am evolving. That talk, Visions of a Learning Future will focus on the idea tht learnign will be continuous, technolgical, and immersive and engaging.

The nature of learning is changing. It's easy to say that no, people are the same always, therefore learning will essentially remain the same for the rest of history. but I don't think that's so.

Technology changes us. While many of our aspirations, instincts, goals, and drives remain the same over the centuries, I think others truly do change. We are NOT the same as cro magnon was. Our different understanding of the universe literally makes us different at a very low level from medeival folk. And reading and writing on papyrus makes you a DIFFERENT kind of person than if you only use clay tablets.

Of course the differences may be small at first. They may be incremental based on how divergent technologies are, how divergent knowledge is. But that's the crux of the matter. The divergence rate is accelerating. The singularity is near and as we approach teh knee in the curve of technologicla change the difference of each generation's inhabitants from those before is greater than the generational differnece before.

The effects of accelerating change like this are hard to grasp, because we want the acceleartion to only apply to a few select things. But the acceleration of EVERYTHING is increasing...better, perhaps to think of our world as existing as an expanding universe of manifold dimensions. Everyting is expanding and rushing away from what came before. Think of those metadata browsers that cluster documents or files or other objects based on some notional idea of 'proximity' . Whichever idea you choose, each generation of objects is always further away, less proximal, to each other than the previous generation .

That's actually an interesting idea. the iplication is that, past the takeoff point, we will change so rapidly that successive generations may not recognize each other as being of the same species. Charles Stross plays with this idea a bit in Accelerando.

I'll write a bit more about learning technologies and how they affect this in anothe rpost, I think.
One place where it will begin to play in the near future, however, is the migration of education into the immersive virtual world of 3d games...we'll look at how those will emerge and blend for everyday learning next time.

Bill

The Illusionist -- a Study in Cinematic Language

2007-03-10T21:38:00.000Z

Went to see the Illusionist today. Excellent film, a little slow starting, but the pace grew quickly. It was, of course, a bit predictable, but the story is probably a better one than The Prestige from a literary stance.

I won't give away any spoilers here, but the cinematic language used in The Illusionist is fascinating. The manner in which the plot is communicated visually, even down to some unusual costuming choices, telegraph the plot to you if you are prepared to receive it. There are, in fact, two scenes, with no dialogue, that disclose the entire plot. There are also a handful of scenes that provide more discernible clues, but the action and dialogue are very good at not giving away too much. At the same time, there is no cheesy use of cinematic special effects or illusions to hide or disguise the actual plot.

Cinematic language, from the interplay of characters in frame and out, to the precise angle of a mirror in a scene can be most telling if you learn to expect it, keep an eye out for it, and interpret it. In the Illusionist, I found the use of such language to be quite precise. it was very well done.

The hilarious bit is in one line where the lead character (Ed Norton) is taking to the Police Inspector (Paul Giamatti). Eisenheim asks, "Are you totally corrupt?" and Inspector Uhl replies, "Not totally, no". It was great.

Regards
Bill

Face of Fashion --- A Disaster in Photogrpahy

2007-02-22T14:11:00.000Z

Went to London an dcaught the face of Fashion exhibit at the National Gallery. now, photography exhibits at musuems usually bore me because they are all war shots, suffering shots, screaming shots, or poor naked baby shots. And while I understand the importance and significance of such photographs, there is a limit to the amount of ugliness I will seek out in a museum.

But Face of Fashion sounded promising

God, was I wrong.

First, there were only 6 photographers represented
There weren't more than 50 photos, many very small
There were only 2 decent photos in the lot...one of Tilda Swinton and one of Angelina Jolie
And, Oh yes, THERE WAS NO FASHION

Most of the exhibit was centered around and obsessed with Kate Moss (maybe she funded it). Cocaine Kate is a very uninteresting face, has the anorexic body of a starved 12 year old boy and cannot emote to the camera worth a damn. Corrine Day should find something else to shoot...Kate is over.

Oh yeah...just an FYI ... Nude photos do not constitute FASHION photography. nothing wrong with nudes, but they are not Fashion ... unless the model is wearing a hat!

This was not a fashion photogrpahy exhibit...this was a celebrity photo exhibit. And let's catch them or pose them in unflattering poses, with images of agony on their faces...after all, this IS for a museum.

The exhibit might have been valid as art if it had been titled Celebrities in Bondage or Paqinful Poses or something...but these were not, many of them, fashion models, there was no fashion in the shoe, and the pictures just made the people look ugly, not sensitive, not metaphorical, not interesting...just ugly.

A photo of Justin Timberlake (fad maybe, fashion...NOT!) with a bloody nose and Kevin Federline with a gashed throat just do not cut it as fashion, and not even as the 'faces of fashion'. One might have expected portraits of designers from the title...maybe some beauty and style from such photogrpahers as Helmut Newton or Irving Penn but no, we got to see Kate Moss naked and Justin Timberlake bloody.

the best photos were by Paolo Roversi and his photo of Tilda Swinton was lovely...and fashion concious in that she was wearing a very interesting leather jacket. Unfortunately, he photographs small...his photos were not large enough to reveal interesting details.

So this was a fine way to waste £16 ... 8 each for me and Linda. I hope the National Gallery does something worthwhile with the money.

Bill

Parking as Self Organizing Behaviour

2007-01-02T22:34:00.000Z

Well Christmas and New Year's are both done now. We had a very nice holiday season which included our son Ian coming to visit and day trips to both Dublin and Limerick.

While shopping around Galway I began to understand why some people complain about the traffic here. They don't REALLY have traffic jams that are much worse than anywhere else in terms of the time they tie you up, but as I mentioned in a previous post, parking can take a while.

However, lately I've begun to think that the populace of Galway have responded to the parking needs of the city in a very self-organized manner. Typically by large scale violations of the law. A few examples will illustrate what I mean.

First, there is Salthill, the suburb I live in. Salthill has a main street, a street lined with restaurants, bars, casinos, shops, banks, and a post office. And on this street, parking is allowed only on one side. The entire road is only wide enough for four vehicles side by side and parking is prohibited on one side via the double yellow line marking common in Europe.

However, this double yellow line is completely ignored. People park on both sides of this street, most often, it seems, to do business in the post office. I suspect the mental gymnastics that occur follow the lines of "I will only be in the post office a few minutes, so parking won't matter".

But another way of looking at this behaviour is from the standpoint of a system which is either random or self-organizing. My thinking goes like this:

The people of the town have to do business in person in the post office
The people no longer walk as much as they did when the PO was built and the road designed
People drive much more now
The PO needs to provide a parking lot
The PO has no parking lot
The road is therefore used as a parking lot to the degree it is required
Parking on both sides does not slow traffic too much
Most people actually ARE done in just a few minutes
So people automatically began to park on the double yellow line

The Garda is sometimes seen in Salthill
A Garda station is approximately 2 blocks from the main street
Sometimes they are seen walking up and down on main street
They are not seen clamping cars parked on the double yellow lines

There seems to be an acceptance of the violations. It is apparently recognized that there is a necessity for the parking but there is no place it can be done. There is a self organized behaviour that emerges and which COULD be resisted by the authorities, but doing so would be hopeless...the number of illegally parked cars probably exceeds the number of clamps available for use.

A second example I noticed this evening. We drove to a restaurant in a shopping centre. There was, by the time we got there, plenty of parking in the 'official' parking lot with its rows of orthogonal spaces across the two lanes of shopping centre traffic. But many parkers had opted to park closer to the restaurant by parking at an angle across a yellow box painted on the road on the side of the roadway next to the restaurant.

These cars were definitely parked illegally, but because of the time of day, they were not causing anyone any trouble. The yellow box was not supposed to be blocked, but at least 15 cars were doing exactly that. They had parked parallel to each other, but at an angle that was convenient, not orthogonal to the curb. These people had self organized to form a convenient and effective solution to parking...it just happened to be illegal.

Some might simply say that people here engage in these illegal, unsanctioned solutions because there is insufficient Garda presence to enforce the rules. but the Garda participate in that they do not clamp such parkers in Salthill (a reaction that would just tie traffic in knots anyway). while they do clamp other offenders in different places.

Rather, I submit, a consensus emerges from the group dynamic in response to the conditions. Consequently, parking patterns emerge as self organizing behaviour, arrived at individually and commonly, organized to accommodate the needs of the parkers and the drivers alike, representing a system that is adapting to the constraints it finds itself under.

Regards
Bill

The Pace of Life in Galway

2006-11-27T01:46:00.000Z

Well, it's one of my insomnia nights and here I am blogging again. This is not good because I have to catch a train to Dublin in the morning...maybe i'll sleep on the train.

but what I've been thinking about, my brain all awhirl with sleeplessness, is what i am missing at this time of year as we prepare for christmas.

And what i am missing is the slow, langorous, leisurly pace of my life in Dallas at christmas time.

If I hear one more Galwegian decry the hectic pace of life in the US, I may explode. let me make this perfectly clear. You folks living here in Galway lead a tremendously hectic, fast paced, fast talking, confusing life. there is no leisurely pace here. i know...I've tried to do some christmas shopping the last two weeks and I am giving it up

first, let me explain my Christmas time rituals in Dallas. We take a weekend or two around Thanksgiving (this week of the November calendar) and begin to accumulate a few things for a Turkey dinner. We know who's comng to dinner by then, whos cooking, what we'll make, and we have all we need.

At Thanksgiving, contrary to the sitcoms you see, the turkey is perfect, the meal is grand, the relatives are loving and lovely, the friends stop by, and the weather is gorgeous. I cannot recall a bad thanksgiving dinner in the last 30 years...perhaps the dinner rolls were not QUITE DONE when everyone sat down to eat, but that is the most significant issue.

The quiet after dinner period, bellies full of turkey and bloodstreams full of triptophan, are times of speculation, conversation, football watching and football playing. Perhaps a movie in the evening and, of course, leftover turkey sandwiches for dinner.

The next day begins the official christmas shopping season. Which we partake of.

A quiet leisurely drive to the mall, valet parking to avoid the crush. Then the fun begins. A four, maybe six hour saunter around the four floors and four hundred stores available to us for shopping. Just walking the mall from end to end on a single floor can take 90 minutes of slow, contemplative browsing and talking. We solve the world's problems on the way.

We wander around slowly, no hurries. We watch the children's shows with the puppets, the carollers, the kiddie train, the SPCA with their pets. We glance at shop windows never intending to enter...not yet, that would break the spell.

We stop for hot chocolates or coffees (and a christmas cookie, of course). Perhaps we step into a fine italian restaurant and make a reservation for later in the evening. We ooh and ahh over some of the window displays; Victroria's Secret with lovely lingerie clad angels cleverly and oh so effectively mixing eroticism with religion. But we do not enter such a hallowed temple yet...that's for later.

Home theater stores and electronics stores beckon with gadgets and TVs showing sports on 30 channels it seems. The NASCAR store has a huge video wall of a race in Sao Paulo or perhaps Daytona. Maybe we even get to see our own Texas Motor Speedway. the 40,000 people at it might explain why the mall is not as crowded as the news people always predict.

We stop and look over the rail from the third floor at the ice rink on the basement level, nearly 50 feet below. The Zamboni finishes its magical smoothing circuit and the suddenly the children are swirling around the rink widershins, flying in laughing rings around the Christmas tree that rises from the rink to top out above our heads near the roof of the fourth floor. looking up at its apex, we see joggers through the barrel vaulted glass roof of the mall as they trot their way around the rim of the mall roof in the cool autumn air. One of them glances down through the glass and slows to watch the children far below; both parties wave at each other.

The music in the mall at this time of year is phenomenal and we take our time around the musical displays. A small chamber group is playing carols on woodwinds outside a bookstore. A little further down, an animatronic puppet theater is enthralling more children sitting in front of it as a musical version of Dicken's Christmas Carol is played out over an elaborate 45 minutes of story and song...children from 2 to 20 sit on th floor and watch, never moving.

At least three groups of carolers, dressed in Victorian costumes, of course, slowly make their way around the mall perimeters on each floor stopping to sing in rich, but quiet voices. Their timings are coordinated so they never overlap spatially and do not interfere with each other or other dipslays. Pink noise is wafting through the malls PA system, perpetually maintaining a softness and comfortable level to the ambient sound. The carpeted floors and soft uphosltery also serve to moderate the noise of 20,000 people passing through a shopping center larger than Shannon airport.

One whole end of the mall has been given way to a christmas train journey that takes up about 15000 square feet of storefront. The mall management company actually reserves this storefront all year so that it may be used for the ride. in other seasons it is an art gallery or rented to smaller merchants who agree to vacate for the christmas season in return for much lower rents during the year.

Santa, of course, is also near so wishes can be expressed and photographs can be taken. he's a pretty good looking one this year and the children love telling him what they want. he arrived by helicopter on Thankgiving day during the downtown parade, then this morning by helicopter just as the stores were opening.

for us (my wife and I) the bookstores beckon, of course, and we check out the displays in Rizzoli's (The place for photography books in particular) and Brentano's (art books, architecture, and perfect gift books) and Shakepeare Beethoven (they always have the most high brow). On later shopping excursions we will go to a different mall that has a 100,000 square foot Barnes and Noble store in one corner. most of our actual purchases will be made there. It is great for browsing, reading in the overstuffed chairs, and listening to book clubs and speakers or getting into conversations with friends you haven't seen in a year.

finally, after several hours of just looking about and listening and eating and drinking perhaps with a stop for something a bit stronger in the bar of the hotel attached to this mall, we decide to actually do a bit of purchasing. The recon pass is mostly over and we've seen several things we decide to get at the CD/DVD store, the bookstore, a craft shop, and the pen store (something for my business partner who collects pens). The goth clothing store for a gift for a musician friend and a golf present for my brother-in-law from one of the sporting memoribilia stores.

Then it's about dinner time. The sky has darkened over the glass roof, the mall lights are a bit dimmer for the evening, the soft blue lights in the glass rails and floating tree gardens creating a gentle wintry feel without the cold. The restaurant is italian and serves fantastic food on the terrace overlooking the ice rink. There is a great mexican restaurant and an american grill down at rink level, but we enjoy Nicola's best.

finally, we are ready to leave...we pick the car up from the valet (he's been holding it by the curb for us because we are regular customers and i tip well...these guys work hard and deserve it) then head for home. traffic is light on the freeway and we talk about catching a movie first as we pass the cinemas on the way toward the house. We have over 60 screens to choose from in about ten minues distance from the house.

Tomorrow we'll go look at christmas trees. Our favorite lot will be open and set up...they come down from Michigan. we'll wander around the garden center and the tree lot for an hour or so sipping the hot chocolate they give to customers. When we find a tree we'll arrange for them to deliver it on Sunday and set it up in the house. These are the greatest christmas tree sellers we've ever encountered. their trees smell fantastic, fragrances of cedar and pine and douglas fir. my favorite tree lately though is the noble fir and they always have wonderful ones with the soft silvery green needles and the splayed branches. I love the smell too...nobles have a tang most other evergreens don't.

After tree buying it's off to Cotton Patch restaurant for a bit of comfort food in the form of chicken fried steak, cream gravy, black eyed peas and green beans with soft wheat rolls drowned in hot butter and tupelo honey...and a chat with our favorite waiter Zak who in a fevered delirium recently shaved his head, but cannot explain exactly why. we spend about 2 hours enjoying lunch, then back home to knock around the house and get the living room ready for the tree.

Once the tree is up we'll take weeks to decorate it, a little at a time each evening. Linda always embroiders a few new ornaments each year using plastic canvas and sparkling yarn. She works on one for a couple of nights then pops it on the tree. After that it becomes one more in the collection. some of them go to family as gifts as well.

We'll string out what lights we have, then go buy several replacement strings because it makes no sense to spend our time trying to find the one burned out bulb when a new string of 100 or 200 costs $2.

I'll set up the lights in the yard (we drape lights over the waterfall at the end of our pool) as well and then we'll spend a few evenings driving around the neighborhoods and city centers looking at lights. The gated communities with their perfectly orderly identical and supremely manicured decorations...the middle class neighborhoods with much more variety like the korean christmas decorations next to the kwansa house, and the guy who puts out ten thousand more lights than anyone else, but is willing to climb on anyone's roof to help set up their lights just because he loves christmas.

The older neighborhoods go all out with an absolute riot of styles, colors ,ideas, and traditions...hispanic neighborhoods are the most beautiful in many ways. And the people who have done their houses up always sit on their porches long into the evening, chatting, sometimes singing carols and having big block parties with barbeques and huge meals.

Somewhere in december we take a few afternoons off to go out to malls separately and pick up items we have seen that we know each other will like. We take our time and accumulate our presents slowly under our tree, enjoying the experience of shopping, seeing store people we know, running into friends and chatting for a while over at starbucks or maybe hooking up for dinner. recently I have begun to have most off my presents wrapped by the charity tables in the malls. its a good way to contribute to their causes and I am a lousy wrapper. My packages look oh so much neater now. but I always wind up wrapping several items myself on Christmas eve.

Electronic shopping allows a lot of our gifts to be ordered and wrapped and shipped without having to travel to the post office, but there is always a day when we must go there and stand in line a while...usually chatting with strangers for 5 or 10 minutes until its our turn. The US post office always puts on extra staff and arranges to make it as easy as possible to get the mailings done quickly...although it pays to know WHICH of the five post offices nearby are the most efficient ones. i like to finish up those afternoons with a lunch of fried chicken gizzards...more comfort food and best when the air has finally chilled to about 6 degrees celcius a week before christmas. i get a mess of gizzards to go then take them over to starbucks at barnes and noble and eat them with double espressos or hot chocolate and several magazines or newspapers from around the world...pure heaven.

Of course there are the parties to go to , but we take those casually and most poeple try to meet up for small dinners rather than big parties.

so our pace of life in Dallas at christmas is slow and deliberate. we noticed that the same thing applied in San Jose although on a slightly smaller scale.

here though, I was astounded to get caught in terrible traffic trying to get into city center yesterday, then there is no place to park, i had to go all the way to the top deck of the MCP and walk back down a flight of metal steps in the biting wind ... valet parking would be a really good idea.

And we lost so much time getting there that we had only a couple of hours before things closed. Not much stays open to 11.30 around here as in Dallas at Christmas. the streets were filled with people rushing headlong up and down, the stores were frightfully crowded, very few sales people to help, and quite hot with all the bodies pressed in.

everyone was rushed and harried, you had to literally grab someone to get any attention (tried desperately to buy a new pair of shoes and wound up in some very strange discussion where this woman could only tell me that all shoes in ireland were smaller than US shoes...i still am not sure i know what she meant, but she was quite annoyed with me for asking for 48's.

What with having to go not only to shopping street, but to the Woodies DIY, the ARGOS (49 working days for delivery of some flatpack wardrobes seems outrageous) then to the Wellpark Centre to check out something at the Sony Centre, we spent a huge amount of our time burning petrol in long traffic jams.

My wife Linda sums it up about the roads here by saying that there is no excuse for a western civilized country to not have high speed limited access motorways between at least its three major cities. She is right...spend the few billion euro, hire the workers from anywhere you can find them, use the latest, fastest, most sophisticated technology, build the roads in 5 years, and just get it done...or the CELTIC TIGER will die of starvation, caught in a snare of its own making...GOVERNMENTS SHOULD BUILD ROADS...from the time of Rome this has been the key to prosperity. The US has the economy it has today because of the interstate highway system.

So don't talk to me about the pace of life in the US...we have a slow, quiet, peaceful pace of life in Dallas (and its even slower in Austin and San Antonio). The ludicrous situations you see in American TV shows and movies are crafted to counterpoint the reality, to make us laugh in relief because we know our lives are not so hectic and thereby we are made grateful for the calmness we have. Those idiots on TV, the overweight middle aged guys with imporbably beautiful wives struggling through ridiculous scenarios and situations are exactly NOT us. for which we give thanks at this time of year :)

But here I have to dodge people flying headlong on their errands because they have so much effort to expend to get from errand to errand and so little time left in each day to do them. Do you ever wonder how much time people in this town waste trying to park a car? Not only the slow creep LOOKING for the spot, but the in and out and in and out routine to get the car into the spot? It adds up to a significant portion of life that could be spent enjoying the flowers. First thing to do, ANGLE the parking spaces...you have a positive fetish about one way systems here anyway, so why not angle the spaces in the right direction. second thing...re-mark the spaces to match the emerging average car size...SUVs and Mercedes sedans do NOT fit the old spaces...the populace has voted with its euros...they LIKE bigger cars, they BUY bigger cars...make it easier for them to PARK bigger cars...it translates into more time they spend in the shops BUYING stuff than in the car park trying to park.

it is time to rebuild Galway to make it convenient for its citizens. A convenient city prospers because it provides more opportunity for commerce to flow, for services to emerge, and for efficiencies to appear...cities are machines and systems for maximizing the prosperity of residents; they should be lubricated with convenience.

So that is what I am missing here in Galway at Christmas...my peaceful leisurely pace of life in Dallas around this time of year. We're going to take a few days to go to London for some quiet shopping too...now that's a place where you can really relax and take your time about shopping.

regards
Bill

The Latest Bond

2006-11-19T01:32:00.000Z

Went to see Casino Royale today

first -- VERY good movie
second -- VERY long movie -- 2:45 -- got my money's worth
third -- He still doesn't look like BOND! -- He's not suave enough, he's not sophisticated enough, he's got the wrong color hair, and his eyes are too close together. My wife says he's not pretty enough.

All that said, the story was pretty good, long enough to develop the primary tenets of the book, and gives insight into the origin of the bond character

Of course, the continuity is destroyed.
The movie is set in 2006 ... but James becomes a 00 at the begining of the film...and Judi Dench is already M.

The producers apparently plan on rebooting the franchise ... so maybe we will shortly see a new version of Dr. No or Thunderball (apparently already in planning).

Daniel Craig played Bond fairly well ... he is a good actor. However, he just does not look right...in the way that Roger Moore never looked right and even George Lazenby looked more Bondly (is that a word? ... it is, now.) connery remains the one closet to the look of richard Conte who inspired Casino Royale's cover.

We were missing a few characters that should be in every Bond film, but aside from that, it was a good serious adaptation of the book...modernized, of course, but not overly divergent from the novel.

Amazing to think the Bond franchise has gone on now for 53 years...and the stories can still be interesting and immensely enjoyable.

bill

LIFT Conference (2006) -- Bruce Sterling (2006)

2006-10-18T15:07:00.000+01:00

Fascinating 30 minute speech by Bruce Sterling on a future about 30 years away where the world is filled with blogjects and things he calls spimes. I think it's closer than that.

Bruce Sterling is a writer and visionary. He speaks about "spimes and the future of artifacts".

Issues of assessment

2006-09-16T21:44:00.000+01:00

I had a very interesting day today shopping around for some stuff and it suddenly made me think of a very serious research area we need to look into here at DERI.

Looking back over today's adventures I realized that about 85% of the time, when I asked a question of a sales or service person here in Galway, the first answer I was given was incorrect.

These questions ranged from "is the item I ordered from Argos ready for pickup?" to "Do you have that in stock?", to "How many potato skins come in a small order?"

These were completely mundane questions and the sort of questions you would expect clerks, waiters, and service persons to know. However, in virtually every case, the FIRST answer given was incorrect. Analysis later (and some careful questioning of these folks) revealed that, largely, this was because they wanted to impart information, they wanted to be helpful, and in most case honestly believed the first answer was correct and were surprised to discover they were wrong. In one case the clerk was quoting a computer generated report and IT was wrong.

As I thought about this I suddenly realized that, if this is a cutltural phenomenon, it could be very important for issues of elearning, particularly assessment. In any culture where accuracy is sacrificed to answers, assessment of the efficacy of an elearning regime may need to take that into account to be effective and to properly reflect the state of the student.

So one very interesting research project would be to ask and answer the question,"How often is the FIRST answer to factual questions correct in a given culture/country/region?" Does it vary significantly with culture? Does it vary enough that it needs to be adjusted for in eLearning assessment strategies? Is this one more area where systems need to be contextually aware and make semantically powered adaptations?

Thoughts on this?

Bill

Superman Returns

2006-07-17T03:39:00.000+01:00

So here I am, hanging out in Galway

It's been a busy month here, but the new job is working out great and I have an apartment, (which overlooks Rusheen Bay, by the way and is exquisite) and I have settled in almost completely. Of course, I still have to go back to San Jose and finish crating and freighting.

But today I am insomiac, it's 3.30 am, and it's been a quiet, uncomplicated Sunday. So I'm writing this.

This afternoon I went out to see Superman Returns.

WOW. This is one of the best movies I have seen this year. The story is solid, the acting is excellent and Kevin Spacey makes a scary Lex Luthor.

But mostly I was impressed with the serious way the film dealt with what it means to be Superman. And the fact that the writers and director did not cop out and take the predictable characterizations and plot lines.

So, when characters act in unexpected ways and the plot develops along lines that are not as stagnantly predictable as most films these days, I am impressed.

I'm not sure I care for Routh in the part, however. His acting is fine but he looks odd for Superman...he has features that are too heavy and sharp. However, he is reminsicent of Chris Reeve and that seems to have been a plus for him.

So I definitely recommend seeing this film..it is solid and outstanding.

On other fronts, Galway is very beautiful. Recently the weather has been sunny and fair and warm. I'm learning where things are and what's available. Finally got the right bed in the apartment. I'm finding costs a bit higher than Dallas, but lower than San Jose.

Running the gauntlet of officaldom has been the biggest challenge...trying to get work permit, bank account, debit card, pin for debit card (was sent to california by mistake) and online access (pin also sent to california) has been the biggest frustration, but those are finally sorting themselves out. I await one more magic number from the formal officialdom of Ireland and then I think I am completely installed.

Even the Irish joke about how long things take in Ireland and how everything takes longer than you expect. The 4pm movie today didn't start the projector until 4.15. But all things come to those who wait.

From a standpoint of work, I am enjoying the challenge of setting up and growing our eLearnign Cluster. We have openings for several post and pre docs and we have some interesting labs being set up to facilitate research. These include a computer/human interface lab, a mobile and multi modal device lab and potentially a psychology lab to study why people do not jump at elearning opportunities. I already have an ePedagogy, Semantic infrastrucutres, development , and business analysis lab set up and staffed.

My goal is to really grow our cluster into one that suports a wide variety of elearning research initiatives which a robust de velopment group transforms into deliverable technologies. So far, I've met with nothing but support from everyone here.

Take care everyone...i'll writed later
bill

Designer Babies will be perfect...won't they?

2006-06-19T13:58:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the month and a half delay...recovering from the pneumonia just left me with little energy until now

I'm at Heathrow waiting on a plane. Watching a SKY news report on whether we can expect designer babies soon.

My gut reaction is yes, of course we will have this ability soon. The next question is, of course, what would you design in?

The assumption is always that babies will be designed with perfect health, eyesite, hearing, optimal height for high powered careers, high intelligence, and a good football scholarship.

But wait...

Assume for a moment you are a soon to be pregnant couple. And either your country has been or will soon be at war for a long time...you assume 20 plus years...or you are afraid that in 10 years a new 10 year war will begin. Certainly in 1979 people legitimatley predicted we would be at war in the mid east within 2 decades and they were correct.

Perhaps your country has mandatory military service for healthy adults and that service is NOT a safe tour...very high casualty rates.

So you want to design in a few flaws:
poor enough eyesight to avoid the airforce
flat enough feet to avoid the infantry
a propensity for motion sickness that disqualifies your child for shipboard duty
Maybe not QUITE so tall and hefty and strong
A weak abdominal muscle which can herniate easily under extremes of stress
Mild chronic anemia to make them just a bit too weak for duty

Many such conditions are correctable, but correction requirements could disqualify your child from service...making them safer.

Would you spoof the system in such a way? Would your doctor?

is it ethical? more or less so than to order up a perfect child? Do you tell your child what you did? When?

Sometimes the obvious assumptions have unintended consequences and people in the real world make what seem to be unusual uses of technology...uses we technologists seldom see on the horizon.

Thoughts and comments?

Whoa Dude? How'd I wake in Hospital?

2006-05-08T01:32:00.000+01:00

What a bizarre two weeeks

Went to Galway. Great meetings, great people. Felt great all dat friday as I wandered Galway looking at shops and such.
boarded for Dublin...no worries
Laid over in Dublin for a shot time, then boarded for the US
Laid over in CHicago for 5 hours. took shower,had dinner, felt great
boarded for SJC
3/4 through the filght I start feeling like I'm being buzzed or something, then less and less well, then really sick
Land, stagger, barely able to breathe, off the plane and into car home
Chills, fever of 102.3 (44.7 to the world citizens aout there), nausea, the works!
Clears by the end of the firrst full 24 hours
Can't to sleep as hour after hour pain builds in right lobe of back
Spend all day Monday trying to get ready for AOL visit
Cancel visit at 10am...i am too sick
pain clears at 12noon...I have rescheduled for wed just in case however
Walk to McDonald's with my wife fir sime errands, exercise, and lunch
Start getting worse on way back
Can't breathe and am in intense pain by 5pm
Head for emergency roon at 5
Have prelim diagnosis of pneumonnia by 10pm and am admitted by 12
Have been here since May 1...feeling better

Two tired for rest of story right now...will blog more tomorrow

Bill

Been a busy month

2006-04-07T17:55:00.000+01:00

Let's see, what's been going on.
Came down with a terrible two week cold around the middle of March...just in time for my meeting with IBM.

Found some really interesting consulting to do. It dovetails nicely with the FrankenFilm concept. Can't say much about it yet, but keep an eye on the FrankenFilm site; new developments will most likely show up there.

Had a wonderful time visiting IBM's Alamden Research Center to present thoughts on self adapting content and the future of computing surfaces. I am becoming more and more interested in these ideas I am formng about new computing surfaces...beyond desktops and tablets.

Will be going off to Galway again soon to talk to the folks at DERI. That is a very interesting group and they are exploring some of the most fascinating semantic web ideas out there.

I've included a photo Gavin Mckenzie found of a bunch of us at the Intl Semantic Web Conference we attended last year...otherwise entitled Geeks!

Gavin on the left in the rear, me on the right, everyone else were folks gathered around a powerpoint we all shared...geeks indeed!

So, a busy month!
Got through my patent submission and did some more work on FrankenFilm but it needs more work before it is ready.

Need to get patent work on it finished soon too.

Guess I have to do taxes soon...getting close to deadline time.

That's it for the moment. Been raining cats and dogs here in San Jose, but that's supposed to clear up by mid April. Hope so, I didn't move out here for the rain!

Bill

The Mother Paradox - A Resolution

2006-03-06T07:45:00.000Z

I haven't seen this explaination before, so I thought I would submit it here.

The Mother or Grandfather paradox is a classic when discussing Time Travel scenarios. Essentially it goes:

If a time traveller goes back in time and kills his mother before he was born then you have a paradox...he wasn't born so he can't have gone back in time to do the killing in which case he was born and did in which case he wasn't and didn't, etc, etc

But the classic statement of the paradox ignores an interpretation of quantum physics, namely Wheeler's Many Worlds Hypothesis.

If the time traveller DOES kill his mother, then he creates a new world, a new universe in which he exists having crossed over from the universe in which he never existed. The paradox is resolved by a simple sideways shuffle. After the killing, he resides in a universe in which he exists, but in which he never did exist.

The beauty of it is that this gets around cosmic censorship while still observing it. No, you cannot have time travel in a manner which creates paradoxes. cosmic censorship sees to that. So you have to move into a universe in which your presence does not create a paradox. With an infinite number of them to choose from, not a problem.

Regards
Bill

Intelligent Designers

2006-03-05T18:31:00.000Z

Isn't it interesting that people, for some obscure psychological reason, continue to ascribe to dieties those powers and abilities rightfully reserved for humans and other intelligent species?

Discussions on Visualizations

2006-02-25T02:42:00.000Z

I attended Pat Hanrahan's talk the other day at Adobe. It was on visualization techniques. It was interesting although I found it a little basic. The techniques he described have a long history, dating back to Minard's map of Napoleon's Russian campaign. Phase Space representations and simplified distorted topologies were both shown and discussed. These are certainly valuable visualization techniques, but both have been around for a while.

Phase space representations came of age in 1963 when when Edward Lorenz was plotting weather data and derived the Lorentz Attractor which is a phase space visualization of the data he gathered.

Hanrahan's primary point, however, that the visualization should be chosen to work best with the context in which the data needs to be delivered, is spot on. In many respects, a contextually approrpriate visualization can present data in a manenr that highlights the information content specifically.

This is especially important for self-adapting content. You can extrapolate most of the same principles when the issue of transforming or adapting content to different devices and contexts.

Belief -- Why We Know What We Know

2006-01-28T06:54:00.000Z

I had a fascinating conversation recently regarding belief. It got me to thinking about the nature of belief and faith and knowledge.

I am very interested in knowledge, what we know, how we know it and how we model it. But knowledge has, for humans, an emotional component. That is, while you know what you know (to an infinite level of recursion by the way) you also have an emotional response to that knowledge we call belief.

Why do I classify belief as an emotional response? Because belief is our emotional response that defends, in a way, our model of the universe. Those things we know very well we come to believe.

Of course belief can be mistaken and it can be changed. We may believe something very strongly, but cease to believe it when presented with strong evidence to the contrary. So, for many years people believed there were only 8 planets in the solar system. Then in 1930 people had to change their belief to accommodate a 9th planet. Many people took quite some time to accommodate this.

We are actually watching a similar belief transition now as people come to terms with the new knowledge that there is a 10th planet beyond Pluto.

But the conversation I was involved in centered around a belief in God. And the person I was in discourse with wanted to know why anyone would not simply choose to believe. He referred to Pascal's Wager which is an argument attributed to Pascal justifying belief in the Christian God on the basis of probability. Essentially, the argument states that one should believe because if one is correct there is an infinite reward to follow whereas if one is wrong there is no harm in having believed during life.

The core problem with this argument, of course, is that we do not CHOOSE to believe. We are drawn to belief, we are coerced to belief by evidence. If I do not find sufficient evidence to believe in a god, I cannot choose to believe in one anyway. In contrast, if I do find sufficient evidence to believe, I cannot choose to NOT believe. Believe is not a choice, it is a coercion.

Tim Holt's website http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/pascalswager.html has a good analysis of the objections to Pascal's Wager of which this is the third.

Belief may be coercive, but it also IS plastic. As evidence accumulates in one direction or another a belief can shift. This is typically, for complex issues and decisions, not a binary switch but rather a continuum that takes the person from a strong belief into the area of doubt, then ultimately to an accolades of the new belief.

But, again, belief is coercive. The accumulation of evidence will ultimately one to a conclusion and a belief even if that is in opposition to previous belief. How many parents honestly believe their child cannot have done THAT (whatever THAT is) only to finally have to acknowledge that the child DID do THAT in the face of more and more incontrovertible evidence.

However, there IS that issue of evidence. While one is coerced to belief by an accumulation of evidence, one's INTERPRETATION of evidence IS a matter of choice. Well, to some degree, anyway. For some things, the evidence is fairly incontrovertible. Or, as Holmes said, "circumstantial evidence my be virtually convincing, as when a trout is found in the milk."

But bigger issues typically have much less clear evidence. So where one person may see evidence of a god in a grain of sand, another may see evidence of complex forces driven by random events. And there is an emotional component to this interpretation as well. We often WANT to believe in particular positions which DOES color our interpretations of evidence even when we try to minimize this.

So where does this leave us? Well, it probably means there is very little chance of people with completely polarized beliefs will be able to convince each other based on current bodies of evidence. And since the interpretation IS colored by other emotionalaspects such as a need or a desire to believe a particular outcome, it is very difficult to move from one point of view to another based solely on improved interpretations. Rather, more and more dramatic evidence is needed. And it is seldom forthcoming.

Comments?
Regards
Bill

Medical Costs of the Future...Lower and Lower

2006-01-22T21:00:00.000Z

The following is an esay from a book I co-authored in 2000 on the impact of technology on future life (Critial Mass, MC2 Publishers, 2000).
This particular essay is on how I and my writing partner came to feel that medical costs would peak, then fall during the 21st century.

Computers and Medicine: Hippocratic Art becomes Marketing Artifice

People of our generation (so called Baby Boomers) were raised to believe several things about doctors and medicine. First, doctors were members of some sort of priesthood. They knew things we could never know. They had education above and beyond that of normal people. We were encouraged to believe that doctors knew what was best for us and knew things about us we could never know.

Second, medical knowledge was the hidden knowledge of the inner sanctum, the runes of health often cast in terms the average person could not even begin to decipher. Body parts, diseases, conditions, bacteria, and viruses were named in Latin or Greek and often seemed deliberately obtuse. We were not meant to read the prescriptions scrawled by our doctors, or to ask too many questions.

Third, they gave you a sucker if you were a good patient.

The attitude is changing, though. Rising medical costs, coupled with a new understanding of disease and health is changing perceptions about the world of medicine. The cost of medical treatment rises at about 3 to 5 times the rate of inflation. Nothing seems to reduce it. Hospitals have tried to rein in costs. Their ideas, from reducing staff and shortening stays to timesharing equipment among facilities do not keep pace. In desperation, hospitals form conglomerates and try to become managed care associations, which tends to reduce the service to their patients while failing to contain costs. Managed care tries to rein in doctor fees, but the cost in care quality is high. They even stop giving away the suckers.

Finally, they try marketing. It begins to work, but in unforeseen ways.

We have a national (perhaps cultural) taboo against marketing medicine. We don’t like our doctors hawking cures to people so desperate they’ll try anything. We used to see it; we called it Patent Medicine and it earned a well-deserved reputation for deception and danger. When anyone could set up shop on a street corner and sing the praises of assorted elixirs to cure everything from smallpox to social diseases the population was at risk and had no recourse when the so-called cures failed. As a nation, we stepped in and began to regulate medicine and drugs as a way to protect ourselves from the charlatans along the road.

Yet, we have found ways to market prescription medicine and even medical care again. We see commercials about new medicines (carefully avoiding any statement of what they treat) and we see billboards from hospitals regarding the level of obstetric and neo-natal and cardiac care they provide (again, carefully couched to avoid any claims or any discussion of costs). Every sports magazine, women’s magazine and health magazine on the newsstand carries at least a few full page advertisements form prescription medicine, complete with information about uses and side effects that used to be available only to doctors.

We see it because our perception of medicine has changed. The only effective and ethical way to mass-market medicine was to make it more approachable, more understandable. It became necessary to involve patients in their own care to keep costs down. To do that some of the mysticism had to move aside.

Concomitant with the public’s increasing awareness of health and medical issues, computer technology made it possible to consumerize many aspects of medicine. Blood pressure machines began appearing in stores. Electronic thermometers and blood sugar monitors emerged as over the counter devices. Even digital stethoscopes are available to the causal buyer.
While medicine is becoming more approachable and understandable, we still want more. So, what other role does high technology, particularly information technology, play in this move to consumerize medicine?

Start with the hugely expensive MRI and CAT machines. We see amazing images produced by these non-invasive scanners. We can see the Visible Man Project, which available for anyone to see via the Internet, but only possible with computed tomography. Otherwise you would just have thousands of flat photos looking like sliced liver. Because of computed tomography, you can see a three dimensional image that can be rotated in all three axes and zoomed or probed with virtual views. We see TV shows like The Operation with incredibly high tech medical gear. Microsurgery, aided by motion control computers like those used in cinema, allows surgeons to perform absolute miracles.

These devices, while deeply dependent on computer technology, are only the beginning. They are large, complex, and may require a new priesthood of computer-savvy technicians. In addition, they require trained analysts to read the results. What if that were not so?
For centuries, medicine has been viewed as more of an art than a science. Hippocrates’ famous oath, in fact, describes medicine as an art, not a science. The original oath (circa 300 BCE) required young doctors to care for their teachers and teachers’ families and to teach other doctors at no cost. That was probably the first clause to go. It also prohibited surgery (leaving that to the barbers of the time as they had the blades) and abortion. The AMA has changed the original oath just a bit.

Despite the changes in the oath, medicine remains as much art as science. Or, at best, a science in the service of an art.

For example:
Diagnosticians follow complex and intuitive chains of reasoning. Chains they are often at a loss to explain. Arriving at the correct diagnosis in the shortest possible series of steps is still considered one of medicine’s finest skills and students are tested in it constantly. It is obviously important to diagnose the correct problem in the minimum of time since a failure to do so can leave someone very dead. Some doctors have an almost mystical skill at this and they command very high respect in their profession.

Surgeons constantly talk about the delicacy of their operations. “The hands of a surgeon” is a phrase that captures the shamanistic nature of the awe in which surgeons are often held.
And, of course, the old joke goes that you and I, when confronted with a perplexing but solvable problem in our area of expertise, say that, after all, “it’s not rocket science!”

Rocket scientists say, “it’s not brain surgery!”

Brain surgeons say, “actually, it is brain surgery!”

Theirs, it is believed, is the most complicated and delicate of the surgeon’s art. Typical neurosurgeons know this too. They know it all too well. Very big heads in neurosurgery.
Understandable, really. But, perhaps, on the edge of changing.

The advent of the computer has begun a change in this view of medicine. With tremendous amounts of computing power available it is possible to better image the interior of humans and to better simulate the reactions taking place there. Art implies a certain lack of certainty and precision; science implies the opposite. The art of medicine is finally becoming a true science of medicine as our understanding of biochemistry matures. It matures because we can visualize molecules and simulate reactions using computers.

Let us look at a few examples.
Pharmaceutical companies have always referred to their discovery of drugs because of the brute force approach used throughout that industry. The process is changing, however, and now they refer to a drug and its design. Pharmaceutical companies now seek to design molecules, not discover drugs, because we now understand health and disease as macro-level manifestations of molecular processes. To get to this point they have employed information technology at its highest level.

Visualization on computers now allows researchers to see biological processes in simulation. Incredibly complex mathematics used to derive and predict the chemical forces that bind, shape, attract, and repel one organic molecule from another are available as 3D models. Virtual reality with force feedback allows designers to feel those forces as they pick up, twist, bend, and shape chemical compounds into novel and useful forms.

Animal testing moves into the past as our drugs become so tailored to the human condition that the only way to accurately assess their efficacy, other than with human trials, is to simulate their reactions in a human body. Animal models are still great for many purposes, but we can already see the writing on the wall. With the focus now on a genetic basis for disease it will no longer be as useful to test a drug on a rat, a rabbit, or even a chimp. The new class of pharmaceuticals that will emerge in the next few decades will be computer generated and so tailored to humans that animal testing will be useless.

Classic biology has left the realm of the taxonomic and descended to the garage level of the mechanic. Over the last two decades, aided by information technology, biology has begun to finally flourish as a predictive and engineered science. More and more high school biology classes are dissecting frogs virtually rather than using real frogs. Technology created for the film industry to show the subtle changes of a body as it disappears has been re-targeted for use in medical schools to replace the dissection of human cadavers.

Practical medicine is becoming more mechanistic as we unlock the molecular basis of disease, reproduction, and life. As it becomes more mechanistic, it becomes more amenable to being reflected in cyberspace. That is, as our understanding of our physiology drills down toward the lowest molecular nature of life, the information becomes more amenable to digitization. Once digitized, the information that describes the processes that make us ill or make us well can be recognized, manipulated, and administered by computers in far more precise ways than possible today.

Medicine will continue, for a while, to increase in cost. Pharmaceuticals will be costly to develop and the intellectual property represented by them will be hotly protected. But, not for long.
When the computer simulations become accurate enough and when the processes are understood well enough, you will begin to see the movement of medical treatment out of the hospital, outpatient surgery center and doctor’s office to Wal-Mart. You will begin to see computer kiosks that use expert systems to diagnose symptoms described by the customer. Note we said customer, not patient. At this level, you cease being a patient (that has always seemed an interesting term) and become a consumer and customer.

The psychology of taking your medical advice from a machine is considerably different that that of taking such advice from a human practitioner. The writer Larry Niven has referred to autodocs in many of his stories and novels. These are machines you slide into which perform examinations, diagnosis, and finally treatment. Not unlike the booth at the Levi’s shop that measures you for custom made jeans.

We may be a while before we have whole-body autodocs, but you can expect that computerization of medicine will migrate treatment for many ailments into kiosks, into your home and into the mass market. Who needs a pharmacist when a computer can take the prescription and synthesize the molecules needed (the medicine) and dispense directly to you? Who needs a doctor when a computer can take the history, perform the tests, diagnose the ailment, and write the prescription?

Who needs either of them when this can be performed at home? For example, a toilet which will perform many chemical tests on your urine and feces is being developed. The analysis of our eliminations has a long and proud history in medicine (short of surgery, how else could a doctor get anything out of you that had been through the loop, so to speak? Former food was convenient.). Such a toilet will be able to analyze and diagnose a wide variety of conditions. It will recommend treatment, which may be automatically included in your next grocery order since your refrigerator will talk to your toilet.

There is little reason to think that automated treatment is out of the question. Antibiotics could be administered by your bed linens while you sleep or by your clothing the next day. Antibacterial fabric is already a reality. Antibiotic fabric is not too far behind. Nicotine and arthritis patches have made it quite acceptable to have medication dispensed to you through skin absorption.

Our understanding of the effects of particular molecules is increasing steadily. With appropriate analysis of the customer (at the DNA level) and with sufficient computing power it will be possible to have a pharmaceutical synthesizer in your home to catalyze and synthesize molecules tailored to you and your condition. Security is a consideration, but it will be much harder to get an autodoc to dispense unneeded barbiturates or amphetamines than it is to corrupt a human doctor.

A while back Bill had Lasik surgery to improve his eyes. The procedure was painless, quick, and almost completely controlled by computer. It is not too hard to imagine that, in a few years, a machine at a Sears would be available to perform a similar surgery sans ophthalmologist. The necessary computer system to measure, calculate, track and focus a laser to perform such an operation is not beyond imagination at all.

It is not hard to imagine how other forms of simple surgery can be computerized and consumerized. Almost any skin surgery could be done with special lasers and software. Wart, mole, and cyst removal, Melanoma diagnosis, even some liposuction and vein stripping could be made fully safe, cheap, and computerized. Non-invasive surgical techniques will continue to improve with the growing sophistication of computer targeted and focused ultrasound, x-ray, microwave, and other forms of energy.

An elegant solution to bacterial infections is the possibility of using bacteriophages instead of antibiotics. These are viruses which are parasites of bacteria. Specific phages attack specific bacteria. Once the bacteria are dead, the phages die off. The two organisms evolved in twain with each other and bacteria are not likely to develop immunities to phages. They have already adapted as much as necessary. The phage for a particular strain of bacteria is typically found with the bacteria. In the human being, this is usually in the feces.

A computerized toilet could recognize particular disease bacteria, then isolate and amplify the phage associated with that bacteria. The toilet could then insert, inject, or transduce the phage back into the human through injections or patches.

This would form an extremely elegant solution to certain common bacterial infections where today we use broad spectrum antibiotics that prompt many bacteria to form resistant strains. The bacteria die and the phages then die off as well. The intelligent toilet is needed to make it work.

The result is that, in the not too distant future, medicine will become cheap. Sure, we will need controls to make it safe and effective. There will be failures and there will be quackery, but there is a lot of that out there now. We have to move forward to improve medical care, and we can do this if the specialized knowledge of doctors is captured and digitized, the specialized facilities of pharmaceutical companies are miniaturized and digitized, and there is a growing demand for cheaper care.

The driving forces are technological innovation, synthesis miniaturization, and computer control of those processes. The computer control issue is well in hand. Much of the synthesis technology we can take from NASA robot analysis technology on Mars probes. Nanotechnological advances will make chemical factories small and cheap. Research into all of these is in high swing now and we can expect dramatic developments in the future. We can also expect strong resistance.
Pharmaceutical companies are entrenched. Doctors are entrenched. Pharmacists are entrenched. They will all resist as will the public at first. Until the bills roll in.

Where will autodocs catch on first? Probably in third world countries that can’t afford medical care today, much less in the future if the costs keep rising. Provide a village with a device that can accurately diagnose and treat a variety of ailments and injuries for virtually free and third world governments will adopt it with a vengeance. Automated medicine could save millions in developing nations.

Second world nations who are struggling under the effects of brain drains from the cold war will probably adopt it next (they may even be a major part of the development). China, North Korea, and Russia are prime candidates who have or can have the technological skill to develop automated medicine and the lack of skilled practitioners of traditional medicine to prompt a demand.

Ultimately, as our own groaning medical system reaches the limit of its abilities to cope with an aging boomer population (aging into its hundred and twenties because of advances in traditional medicine), we will adopt it here as well. We’ll demand it.
What of the concern that pharmaceutical companies will still be needed to manufacture and distribute the medicines and might still charge inflated prices for them? Pharmaceutical companies rely on intellectual property rights. The molecules they produce and the processes they use to produce them are the secrets they hold dear. But the ability of computer-controlled nanotechnology to manipulate individual atoms into molecular combinations on demand will make those secrets very fleeting.

Once the processes are automated at the atomic or molecular level (rather than the macro reagent level they operate at now) there will be almost nothing to stop any particular drug being taken apart and then re-assembled. Slight, irrelevant changes in the molecule may be the way small firms get around patent issues. Some, in remote seriously ill corners of the globe, will just copy the drug and licenses be damned.

Think of it. Even now, if any village in South Africa (with 10% of its population HIV positive) could synthesize as much AZT as it needed on demand, would patent rights stop them? Not likely.

Sound outrageous? Consider the following:
Cloning of Dolly the sheep (and now many other animals) was accomplished by using delicate but well understood and very replicable techniques. The key turned out to be the application of a minute amount of electricity at just the right point in the process. It is all documented and the equipment and chemicals needed are available and not expensive. Farmers are already looking into it.

DNA strands can now be analyzed by computer circuitry using a special chip that has DNA molecules attached to silicon transistors on the chip. Such a device will soon be used routinely to analyze samples for infections. A home model is already planned.
Scientific American recently published a method by which amateur scientists could invoke the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) in their homes. PCR is a process used in genetic research for rapidly reproducing DNA segments into quantities sufficient for analysis and use. It was invented a few years ago and made DNA research tremendously more effective by reducing the wait times for DNA reactions by factors of thousands. Now, you can do this in your kitchen.

We talk about high-tech medicine in this country all the time, but we’ve seen nothing yet. Most medicine is still the purview of doctors who listen to patients, make an educated guess of the problem, perform a test or two confirm the hypothesis and write a prescription. The “perform a test or two” step is so seriously discouraged by HMO’s and Managed Care insurance (and by National Health in other countries) it is often skipped. None of that is difficult to automate.
When it comes to hospital care, we need to be careful about assuming too much regarding its importance. Most people do not want medical care in hospitals. They tolerate it when nothing else will do. Much hospital care is devoted to easing discomfort in lieu of anything else to be done. People accept that because the discomfort is distracting and depressing.
What people want is medical repair. They want the problem to be corrected and to get on with their lives. Yes, we do want the quick fix. But, if the quick fix actually is a quick fix and the problem actually is corrected, what’s the problem? Influenza used to send millions to their beds and hundreds of thousands to their graves. Now it is a minor annoyance for most in this country.
So, while hospice care for terminal patients will continue in those situations we cannot correct (and there will be many), do not expect people to complain too much about not having hospitals to take care of them when a quick trip to KMart for their cancer cure or to Target for their cardiac repair kit will get them back on track with their life. Automated medicine will offer that.
Medicine and medical care will become very cheap in the future because both are highly amenable to technological innovation and computerization. It is at exactly this intimate level that cyberspace’s digital reflection of our society will be at its sharpest.

This essay is copyright Bill McDaniel and Pat McGrew...used with permission

Pattern Recognition - A New Approach

2006-01-19T19:42:00.000Z

Pattern recognition is re-emerging as one of the most important aspects of Artificial Intelligence and Neurological research. What has recently been determined is that a significant portion of neurological processing is actually pattern matching. Even what we think of as deductive reasoning is begining to be seen as a process involving a tremendous amount of pattern matching in its initial phase.

This re-raises the question of learnign machine algorithms and computational structures such as neural nets. Currently Neural nets have been getting a bad rap...Everyone seems to think that Support Vector Machines, AdaBoost, and other more recently derived algorithms.

However, the simplicity of construction coupled with the complexity of ability that classic neural nets provide strikes me as a powerful place to step off from in search of computational models of effective neurological processes. Or, as I have said before, I do not solve differential equations when I catch a ball (nor even quadratic equations).

Classic neural nets learn to recognize and segregate patterns through altered strengths of the connections between simplistic computing elements (neurons that pefome a simple sigmoid transfer or a discrete threshold transform).

But while neural net based pattern matching relies on strengthenng and weakening connection potentials between these artificial neurons, there are other emergent effects which are not fed back into the pattern matching process.

Essentially, what I am proposing here is that, as in continuous equations, patterns of data have multiple derivatives, slopes if you will, that reflect overlying patterns which moreadvanced techniques can take into account.

Neural nets do this to some degree as it is, but multi-layer nets do it better at the pure data level. The hidden layer of modern neural nets effectively captures the first derivative of the data pattern in an ordered set of connection weights. The connections encode the rate of change of the incoming feature data for different inputs, with differnt variations in those rates of change encoding different pattersn.

Please note, this is all sort of metaphorical. Discussing an encoding of data patterns as derivatives or trates of channge is not precisely accurate. However, Fourier transforms of image data do a similar reduction of a collection of data treated as a distribution of frequencies.

If we carry the analogy a step further, then, we could talk about the second derivative of the data pattern which would be the first derivative of the neural net's resulting pattern. From THAT pattern we could begin to derive deeper recognition of internal structures to our original data.

So, if we had one neural net stacked above another (metaphorically speaking) we could have it watch for pattersn in the lower level net. These patterns woudl arise from the patterns it detected in the data. Allowing the second level net to classify states in the first net provides a deeper, more refined set of nuances to the classification.

My recent experiments with this idea show a great deal of promise. However, the key remains to identify specific features of the first net to pass on to the second. The math associated with this effort is still somewhat obscure.

But the idea of stacked netswatching each other's patterns is similar to the way our brains networks watch each other. By feeding back patterns of connections and classifications about the primary networks, the secondary (and perhaps tertiary) networks can provide non-linear effects that act as perturbing noise in the process of pattern recognition.

Note that I am not talking about extra hidden layers in a network. It has been largely shown that extra hidden layers beyond about 2 do not add any benefit to the processing of the net. I suspect this is actually because we do not construct the nets with sufficient complexity.

However, I am talking about discontiguous nets, one being driven by extracted features from the other which is being driven by extracted features from a document or text corpora. The benefits from recognizing deeper patterns would provide us with nuanced patterns such as a recognition of trend data and sublties within the structure of the original data.

Thsi is a bit different from the other use f the term stacked neural nets that is common. In that use the same dayta (text for example) is passed to multipe nets that are trained to seek specific types of first level patterns. While the nets feed some information to the next net to recieve the data, they are essentially parallel and are all generating this first dericvative I spoke of. In my model, the higher order network is completely unaware of the the actual original text or data coming to it. Rather it is examining patterns of neuronal connections that it sees in the lowel level net without any knowledge of how they came to be.

Comments?
Bill

A Rant -- When Things are Too Hard

2006-01-16T07:20:00.000Z

This is a rant

And, I hate to say it, but it is a rant about how things are done here in the bay area.

In particular, it is a rant about shopping for food

WHAT is it about grocery stores here in San Jose?

The shelves are NEVER stocked well. They are not fronted. My WIFE had to get on the floor and reach deep into the back of the shelves to find peanut butter, corn, pork and beans, and many other canned goods.

Thsi is not just about the Safeway on San Carlos where we shopped today...Albertson's, Zanotto's, even Trader Joe's looks like this a lot.

It wasn't just today...although a mnaager told me that a bunch of people just did not show up to work last night to stock and front shelves. But I have seen all these store look like this many times over the two years I have lived here.

I mentioned that I saw a lot of people wandering around...why couldn't some of them be facing shelves, making shopping more convenient for consumers? He just said they were busy with other things.

I suggested to him that, since I had been approached by two people asking for money for a school just at the front door, he should perhaps pay them to face the shelves. He explained that he couldn't just have "day laborers" do it. Then he walked away.

Well, perhaps he couldn't. Perhaps it really is more complicated than that to keep shelves stocked and faced. Perhaps it is just too hard a job for this manager to make shopping easy and convenient for the customers.

As someone from another place let me make a definitive statement. The customer service in this town sucks! Stores are poorly stocked, have few varieties and are absolutely not interested in making shopping better for the consumer.

Infrastructure is terrible...carts that wobble, tile floors that are cracked, shelf tags that are missing, goods that are mislabelled. From a retail standpoint, this town needs an enema!

I don't understand it. Why is it acceptable here to have poor shopping, poor selection, poor equipment, and poor infrastructure to get things done. The staff are friendly enough. They seem willing to help, but the management and owners, the rule setters and decision makers act as if customers are their last concerns.

I am not just speaking of food store either...clothing stores, music stores, hardware stores, furniture stores, restaurants...all seem to consider customers an interruption and a problem

Well, enough of that. Managers, Store Owners and Operators, clean up your acts and clean up your stores. Stop making excuses and serve your customers.

Bill

Churchill Club Visit and Tech trends

2006-01-13T17:10:00.000Z

I joined the Churchill Club here recently and attended my first meeting last night which was the top tech trends for 2006. This was an interesting panel discussion/debate (not formal) with some audience voting on agreement with the panelists.

I was struck by two specific things
1) Each panel member (VC's of course) had specific vertical interests they wanted to mention. That makes sense, of course. The other panelists would agree or disagree, but everyone had a specific area of technological interest.

2) They did not actually integrate well. At one point Panelist A says X will happen. Panelist B says Y will happen, but A disagrees...Even though Y's occurrence is what will make X possible. Even when they

There was a lot of talk about new bio science trends as the place to make tech plays. There was also discussion about the overall plateauing of software and computing as an industry.

There was quite a lot of discussion and surprise at the idea that leaders in the computing field should recently have become interested in the biotech field.

None of them seemed to get that the next big COMPUTING revolution will be in BIOLOGICAL computation...The leveraging of the new, mechanistic understanding of biological processes at the molecular level to provide a surge in technological innovation in the computing arena.

While the presentation was very interesting, I sensed that the panel and even many of the attendees still didn't get it. The truly amazing thing that is beginning to happen in this century is NOT the advent of whole new technologies like genomics and proteomics, or the incredible advances in speed, performance, and miniaturization of electronics.

The thing to watch is the collapse of barriers between what have been disparate disciplines. Information Theory, as applied to Biological Engineering which feeds back into Materials Science to drive new Information technologies which will expand the biological horizons etc, etc, etc.

The synthesis of all these disparate fields...Biology, materials, electronics, photonics, chemistry, and radiology ... The synthesis of these is where ethe next huge leap in our technological civilization will be coming from.

Watch this space! You think things are strange now with kids getting pierced and tatooed, clothes that are starting to phone home for cleaning instructions, and locale-based technologies allowing the tracking of goods, people, and information?

Wait until the tatoos are wirelessly linked to the net to provide virtual services such as data and voice communication via clothes that reshape themselves based on the contextual environment of the wearer.

It gets weird from here!

And the VC's and Technologists of the world need to look at the synthesis, not the thesis.

My joining the Churchill Club was a good idea though and I intend to take in many of their meetings ... But I urge companies, economists, predictors and VCs trying to find the next big trend to look further out in a sense. The speed of change is about to be so great that 'further out' will be only 36-48 months in time, as it has been for these folks for decades. However, the AMOUNT of change in that time period will be far greater than ever before.

So a good idea today will be an expired idea in 6 months...Having already made its mark and brought in its revenue. To get ahead of THAT curve, people need to look at the emergent consequences of the exponentially increasing rate of change and figure out how what appear to be diverse technological trends will converge into products, services, and business models in a very sort time.

Comments?
Bill

Singularities and Growth Curves

2006-01-09T18:47:00.000Z

I am in the middle of reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. This book inspired the previous one I mentioned, Accelreando, it is fairly obvious.

The recognition of accererating reurns is certainly the most important concept in the book. As far back as 1996 I began talking in my presentations to electronic document professionals, about how change was coming quickly, but the second derivative, the acceleation of that change was far more important than the speed of change itself. It is a hard concept for people to understand.

Change always seems to be coming too quickly. The very idea that it may be coming ever MORE quickly is frightening to many. Hwever, Kurzweil does an excellent job of explaining how accelerating returns really means that change and evolutionary shift IS occurring at ever increasing paces.

The conclusion he draws, about people merging with their technology to produce a new evolutionary step in the track of humanity is debatable. It is extremely difficult for most to concieve of such radical changes while still having the result be 'human'.

His arguments, however, are very cogent. The nature of humanity is certainly not tied up in our limbs, our physical form, or even our ways of interacting with the world. Is this not precisel what most major religions are teaching? That these physical forms do not matter? In many respects I see the same concepts in Singularity but driven by human mediated forces, not supernatural ones.

That makes a great deal of sense to me. We have, as a species, always attempted to transcend ourselves as they are now. suddenly, Singularity is saying, we are going to be able to do that in ways that will be so self evident as to be undeniable. Which leave me with a thought.

here is a debate going on between Evolutionists and Intelligent Design supporters. The gist of ID's arguemnt is that life as we know it, particularly human life, is so complex it MUST have been designed. It could not have emerged through even billions of years of random change and evolutionary pressure.

I do not agree...I see evolution working all the time and I believe it has sufficiently strong scientific evidence to be completely convincing as the driving architect of what we see.

BUT, if Kurzweil is correct, then perhaps the NEXT thing we see is comlex, human, intelligent life that IS designed by an intelligence...US!

The ID folks may just have the characters in their pasion play mixed up!

Scary
Bill

A New Theory of Surfaces?

2005-12-30T07:51:00.000Z

I have been thinking about my ideas for a new theory of surfaces in interior design and I believe I can at last make some comments that are reasonably cogent.

To begin, we should define terms. By Theory of Surfaces I do not refer to the mathematical study of 2 manifolds, but rather to the study of how people use surfaces in a building and what they need from those surfaces. A new theory will deal not just with the aesthetics and the orientation of those surfaces (from horizontal to fully vertical) but with their utility in the light of the 21st century and the way our use of space and surface is changing.

To explore that a little bit, let's consider the future needs for a horizontal surface such as an end table or coffee table. Assuming people will be placing items on the tables including remote controls and computer monitors or keyboards. The fact that these types of devices will be placed on a table changes the requirements for the surface. for example, the coefficient of friction of the tabletop needs to be tuned to allow for smooth operation of keyboards (which tend to be moved quite a lot) while at the same time not being so slick that devices may slide off with just a gentle nudge.

The issue of how surfaces will be used as our lives become more and more technological has to be taken into account when designers are creating new designs and manufactureres are choosing materials. Wood finishes as used in decades ast may not be appropriate for tables that will be used for computers, remotes, video phones, video monitors, dvds and other high tech gadgetry.

Such finishes may not be approrpiate for use by people who will be involved deeply in interactions with computer games, interactive TV, or immersive virtual reality systems. However, new formulations for wood finishes, that protect the wood from scratches, marks, water, and nicks could be used to improve those surfaces for the uses modern dwellings will call upon them to support. Tilting surfaces are an issue as well. Typically, in the past, we have not needed much in the way of tilting surfaces.

Horizontal surfaces have been sufficient as holders of things to be seen, displayed, placed and removed. Vertical surfaces have been sufficient for art anf decoration. But in recent years more and more applicances and utilitarian devices have emerged which benefit from varable angle surfaces; either by resting on them or by creating them. As an example consider the television screen. When it was relativley small and had low resolution, the most important thing about its surface was that it be positioned close to the viewer.

Now with high definition screens that are 42 to 100 inches in diagonal measure the angle of inclination of a screen can add or subtract significantly to or from its functionality. Tilting mounts for tv screens are becoming common since viewing at various angles can improve the reflectivity and glare qualities of some screens. In addition, with the rise of home theater furniture that reclines more fully than traditional recliners, we see a greater need for screen surfaces that can modulate their viewing angles.

Surfaces that accomodate these changes can emerge so that artwork, information displays, and even storage will accomodate varying degrees of slant off the true vertical. By formulating a formal theory of surfaces that takes into account the specific needs of peole to use surfaces in the 21st century, we will have a tool that provides opportunities for designing and developing whole new designs and concepts for furnishings.

These are just some of the ways in which a new theory of surfaces can be useful to designers and developers. Next I'll look at the ways surfaces can augment technologies we are expecting emerge in the next few years.
Bill

Roses and Petals - Algorithms and Equations

2005-12-24T17:43:00.000Z

In business computing we are often implementing algorithms to solve equations. Sometimes these become very complex.

Another approach which we do not employ as often is to derive an equation to replace a more complicated algortithm.

Mathemeticians do this a lot, and Physicists somewhat, but the actual computerization of their equations often turn into highly complex algorithms.

I had an interesting example of reductio ad equation the other day.

There is a game called Petals Around the Rose which is simple, fun to play, and secret. That is, the solution, once you've discovered it, should be kept secret and not revealed. In keeping with that, I will not give any spoilers here.

There is some comment that the 'smarter' you are, the longer it will take you to solve the game. There was also some angry comments about this categorization from people who solved it very quickly and thought the comment meant they were stupid or some such.

Having taken a few minutes to solve it after my wife showed it to me, I would say rather that the more 'analytical' your approach is, the longer it may take you. People who are less analytical and more intuitive may leap to the correct solution almost immediately.

But the solution is an algorithm. It is a recipe for deriving the correct answer. After divining the solution and verifying I was correct, I got to thinking about what it would take to implement a program. The algorithm is not complicated, a few lines of code, but something nagged at me.

I felt there should be a way to arrive at the correct answer in one line of code, a single equation that encapsulated the two curious 'twists' in the algorithm.

A bit of analysis later and I was able to reduce the entire algorithm into a remarkably simple equation. And I must say, that was fun.

I am a big fan of refactoring code. Bang it out, get the algorithm working albeit in an ugly manner, then refactor it over and over. Ultimaely, you should arrive at a much simplefied program which can almost not fail. That is, no matter what you throw into it, a valid result will emerge even if that valid result is the 'incorrect input' error message. No missed error conditions or aborts, no incorrect but reasonable looking results.

I call this elegant programming. For too long we have approached development with a GIGO philosophy which inherently says that we are not going to handle all the conditions. There will be some garbage that can go in and you will get garbage out.

A different approach is to write this level of elegance into our code. You may get garbage in, but you will always get a valid, understandable, result out, even if it is just an explanation that the input was garbage.

This, by the way, flies inthe face of a lot of AI programming. Learning machines in particular seem to be prone to GIGO. But people are not. We deal with garbage input all the time, in particular inconsistent or contradictory input. Better learning and reasoning architectures are needed to emulate our ability to process through the garbage.

There is a lot of good work being done on inconsistent reasoning and uncertainty in inference systems. I reviewed three papers this year on adding uncertainty factors to description logics for the semantic web. But a better way of representing such unertainty and inconsistency is needed. This may reflect back to the comment made to me at IJCAI about looking for the 'ghostly signature' in the data that represents knowledge.

At some point those efforts will result in a computational intelligence being able to intuit the solution to a problem rather than deriving it through analysis. Then we will have made progress

Bill

New Book - Accelerando

2005-12-23T16:59:00.000Z

Accelerando by Charles Stross is a wonderful post-cyberpunk novel about the 21st century and how it might evolve. The book has more extrapolations from the modern web economy than a dog has fleas.

Basically, though, Stross' model of civilization as a collection of economic business models and the idea of extending BPM into the political arena is intriguing. I particularly liked the comment about purchasing an off the shelf legal system then conforming to it

So I heartily recommend it for anyone interested in wild eyed extrapolation of web 2.0 concepts.

Bill

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441012841/002-2620756-7347214?v=glance&n=283155

The Story of Joe

2005-12-14T09:26:00.000Z

This is a description of some thoughts I've had on the future of computing. Just ramblings, perhaps, but the possibility is arising to build something like this and address several problems that are emerging now.

=================================

On The Train
Joe steps onto his morning train for the hour commute to his office. He’s meeting clients later and felt the need for a face to face meeting with his staff before the client meeting. He finds a seat on the train with a table. The table has a SPACE terminal built into its top. Joe’s lucky to get one. This means he won’t have to use his handheld Pad’s smaller screen the whole way into the office like yesterday.

He logs in through the fingerprint login interface. A moment later he sees his SPACE emerge on the tabletop. The NewsSPACE he was watching on the wallscreen before he left the house is still running. CNN indicates the market will be up today.

Joe’s re-opens his personal MailSPACE and a keyboard on the SPACE terminal. He finishes the email to his friends in Europe, then sends it off. Their itinerary had arrived overnight and Joe had dropped it this morning into his TimeSPACE for coordination with his and his wife’s schedules. He wants to be sure he and his wife have plenty of PTO blocked out during the visit.

Joe notices CNN receding. He must be past the halfway point in his journey. He configured his SPACE to shift emphasis from personal SubSPACEs to office SubSPACEs over the course of his trip. SPACE is aware of his terminal’s location, so it begins zooming out of his personal area and into his business area.

Joe slides his fingers over the oleophobic tabletop and SPACE scrolls beneath it until he sees his wife’s shared SPACE. He selects the MessageSPACE and sees his wife look up from her desk at home as the link is connected. She smiles into the camera and says, “Hey! What’s the sitch?”

“Just wanted to say Happy Anniversary. I’ll meet you tonight for dinner.”

“Still not going to tell me where?”

“No, just follow your pad. SPACE’ll get you there. It’ll probably recommend a cab though.”

“Ok, Mr. Mystery”, she says smiling. “I’ll see you wherever there is!” She blows him a kiss and he scrolls back to his SPACE, severing the link.

CNN and his personal MailSPACE are just small tokens now. The OfficeSPACE is showing fully zoomed in and he sees he has a few messages in his office MailSPACE. He looks at these and answers one, flagging the others for later attention.

That done and with another 20 minutes still left in his trip, he calls up the AdSPACE to review today’s presentation. Joe is a Designer and Producer of Adaptive Marketing Campaigns. His latest client wants a comprehensive AMC for their new line of personal SPACE terminals. The line includes pads, sunglasses, audio-only players, and phones. The demographic is 10-25 year olds but subdivided into more than 250 specialized and overlapping sets.

Adaptive Marketing Campaigns are all about communicating with the buyer, delivering the right message about the right product at exactly the right time. Joe and his team design the overall campaign, calling upon graphic designers for the specialized artwork, statisticians for the market data, psychological modelers to build the campaign logic and campaign planners to manage the timing and deployment of the campaign materials.

One wrinkle in the planning is that this client wants to drive the campaign to static media like old fashioned billboards and magazines as well as the more usual media for such a campaign such as mall screens, web-, pod-, and phone-casting, e-books and -zines, and product placement in games and movies. Joe’s team had to pull together a single, coherent piece of collateral for each of the vendor’s products and then, of course, the collective collateral such as the Catalogs, SPACEStore, E-mailings, Opt-ins and the like.

Today’s meeting is to present the single piece of collateral that will drive paper-based posters, billboards, as well as the interactive MallScreen, SPACEStore and Pad formats. Of course, they all look very similar, except where the interactive semantics cut in providing user interface elements on the piece. And the client wants to know the status of extending the collateral piece to include audio-only delivery and interaction. In particular, Joe’s group has to come up with the semantics of marketing the sunglasses with builtin phone and media player to a sub-group that only receives voice. That has been tricky to design, but his team has it nailed, Joe is sure.

The collateral piece opens up in front of Joe on the SPACE terminal. He decides to leave it there as he is in a seat with his back to a wall and the SPACE terminal’s security features will keep anyone outside of a very narrow field of view from seeing the sensitive ad. Otherwise he would tell SPACE to use his Pad’s display while he interacted with the table-based terminal’s SPACE.

He reviews the layout and the logic metadata. The project requires that the collateral piece have some very specialized logic, but it is all declarative and Joe is an expert at interweaving complex logical requirements such as specifying the context in which an online deployment should solicit user input and when it should not.

Joe notices a minor issue with the Information Delivery Object for the new multi-media player the client is marketing and dictates a short annotation into his Pad. The words are transcribed and appear as a typed annotation attached to the object. Mike can fix the glitch in short order.

By now, most of Joe’s personal SPACE has faded into small icons while his office SPACE has taken more and more prominence on the terminal display. He is nearly at his stop only a few blocks from the office.

Suddenly, a larger alert flashes into his vision on the edge of the SPACE. It is a press release that his company has just announced an acquisition. Joe flicks his gaze across the table to his CNN feed and notes that it is growing in prominence again, coming into the foreground. The crawl at the bottom of the CNN feed carries generic information about the acquisition. Joe taps the CNN feed subSPACE and it begins to zoom out again.

He notes, however, that his MailSPACE has a new item in it and when he selects it, it is, as expected, a reminder that employees are blocked form trading for the day of the announcement.

The trains pulls into his stop and Joe logs out from the SPACE terminal in front of him. He leaves the train and walks to his coffee shop. This has been his favorite coffee house for the last six months. He switched from the huge, international coffee house chain, despite the fact they have better coffee…but they haven’t got SPACE yet.

In the Cafe
Joe sits at a table and the logo clears and he sees the café’s menu glowing just beneath the surface. Pressing a selection on the touch sensitive screen, he enters his pin code on the keypad that appears to his left and the table transmits his order to the kitchen and his payment to the bank.

The store and his table both recognized him as he entered the cafe based on the PAN card in his phone. The PAN card passed his identity to the store which guided him and handed him over to the table as he sat down. The store and the table negotiated the context of Joe’s appearance and settled, semantically, on the fact that he was probably in for coffee and a bit of SPACE. The naïve bayesian engine the store runs to help establish context noticed that Joe has done this regularly for 6 months…the calculation of his next probable action in the store was a fairly simplistic one.

The menu clears once Joe has ordered and he logs into his SPACE again. Everything looks just as it did on the train, scaled slightly to take advantage of the larger tabletop display. The fonts are slightly smaller size, as the table adjusts from the train’s accommodation for Joe’s presbyopia. Since he turned 40, he prefers slightly larger reading fonts. On the train SPACE deduced that Joe’s displays needed to have the font sized up. Here on the larger and higher resolution café terminal, SPACE correctly calculates the font sizing as being just a bit lower to achieve the same result.

When Joe first came into the café, 6 months ago the café’s SPACE always brought up his usual configurations. Calendar on his upper right, his Map in the center with all his work and personal objects, and his daughter’s SPACE on the left zoomed out just enough so he could see her latest drawing, while not occupying too much room.

A few months later he had a hiking accident that left his right arm in a sling for a while. The first time he came in after the accident, the café recognized him, of course and when he had sat down, it had brought up the new style configuration. He had granted his SPACE access to his medical records 2 years ago. The semantic metadata attached to them was sufficient for the café reasoner to determine that an alternative configuration would most likely be needed. His view into his daughter’s SPACE was now at the top of his SPACE, and his objects and navigators were shifted to the left a bit. All access controls were distributed around his left hand’s typical position.

As Joe began to use his right arm again over the course of two weeks, SPACE adapted and shifted more of the controls back to the right hand access positions Joe usually used. Now, SPACE has brought up Joe’s favored interface, a MAP, because he is not in a moving train that would cause issues with navigation.

Joe navigates through his MAP quickly, using the virtual navigator control widget that SPACE brought up in easy reach of his left hand.. Joe’s MAP is a 3d simulation of a city street with his personal objects on the left and his workflows on the right. Joe prefers abstract representations of information, so his Information Delivery Objects (what would once have been files) are depicted as variations of shapes and colors where the combinations have meaning to Joe.

He enjoys navigating his MAP. It provides him access to the web, connections both real-time and latent to his friends and colleagues, and he can turn a corner and follow an alley into someone else’s SPACE like his partner’s or his wife’s. And always the representation of information in his SPACE, or in others’ is manipulated to make sense to the way Joe prefers to see things.

Joe selects the CNN Feed and reads more details about the acquisition as he sips his coffee. He has a bit of time before needing to be in the office.

A blue ball appears in Joe’s SPACE suddenly, accompanied by a short phrase of music. This customized PANtone indicates to him that his business partner has just entered the periphery of Joe’s SPACE. Sure enough, when he looks up and behind him at the door, Joe sees his partner, Amy entering the café. He motions her to his table, but she doesn’t see him. She pulls her phone out as it alerts her that she and Joe’s SPACE are overlapping, and the phone’s display shows an arrow pointing toward Joe’s table. She glances that way and waves, slipping the phone back into her purse.

Amy walks over to Joe’s table. He stands and moves to the other side. His SPACE promptly spins itself around on the table display and re-positions itself for his new orientation. As Amy sits, her half of the table pulls up a display of the menu and she orders her triple decaf upside down latte, then logs into SPACE.

Her half of the table reconfigures it’s display to show her SPACE, but conjoins to Joes at the midline. After all, SPACE is SPACE. Amy, however, is not as abstract in her representations and her MAP contains fairly traditional lists of IDOs described in textual fashion.

“We have an hour to the presentation, Joe. Are you set?”
“Yes, but let’s review it a bit.”

Joe navigates in his MAP down his 3d street to the IDO that represents their presentation to a new client. He touches it and slides it with his left hand over toward Amy’s side of SPACE. As it approaches her, the object flips around to become right side up with respect to her and dynamically changes it appearance to conform to Amy’s manner of representation. It docs itself in the workflow area of her MAP.

At the same time, Joe’s and Amy’s objects both open so they can see the presentation. Of course, the presentation format is fixed since they need to manipulate what the client will see, not their own personal preferences for information presentations.

Amy says, “Let’s just view it. I’ll let you make any changes.”

Joe takes Amy through the presentation, pointing out the new logic he added on the train and the issue he’s left for Mike to deal with. “I annotated it. He’ll probably have it fixed before we walk in.”

After about 15 minutes, they finish their drinks which they’ve been setting on the oleophobic surface of the table. As they move the cups around, SPACE detects the presence of real-world objects and reconfigures itself to allow virtual coasters to appear under the drinks. These cover SPACE objects as necessary, but disappear when the cup is lifted or follow it around when the cup is moved. This prevents the cups from triggering any interactions with the display glowing under the surface.

Oleophobic coatings on touch screens means that displays which are almost all touch devices now don’t take up fingerprints or body oil, and do not become smudged. The light sensing tables also correct for brightness and position, their OLED display surface brightening as needed. Even when the barista drags a table outside, SPACE reconfigures it for optimum viewing of the information delivery objects. The objects, in turn, reconfigure themselves as needed. One of the more enjoyable things to watch is when a large group of business colleagues show up for lunch and pull tables together. SPACE objects determine what is happening from the semantics and context of the environment and reconfigure the tables into one long, continuous SPACE. Even the check gets divvied up into a set of IDOs, one for each person, with payments extracted from the correct accounts and receipts deposited into each person’s personal SPACE for future needs.

Amy and Joe finish their coffees and get up to walk on to the office. As they leave, SPACE automatically logs both of them out and returns the display to the coffee house’s logo.

At the Office
Amy and Joe wander down to their office building and pass through security. Their Pads act as security cards and they pass through unimpeded.

Joe walks to his office and as soon as he steps in, his SPACE terminal, a large 32 inch vertical display on his desk, lights up as his Pad links with his office. The SPACE looks just as he left it in the coffee house.

Amy has gone into her office and the same thing has happened except her SPACE terminal is built into her desktop. Joe says he prefers the old fashioned desktop with a monitor on it because it’s easier for him to navigate his 3D worldview.

Amy, on the other hand, uses the horizontal interfaces so much in her work as a designer, that she prefers those. Her desk is also at standing height and she rarely uses her chair.

After dropping their personal belongings, they both head out for the conference room where the client will arrive in 15 minutes. Amy’s Pad beeps as she exits, however, reminding her she left it on the desk. The office recognized htat she had exited through the door and notified her Pad which concluded she needed to be reminded to take it along.

She steps back inside, grabs it and walks out. Her desk-based SPACE terminal had already quiesced and darkened and had not started up again when she came back in.

In the conference room she saw that Joe had already called up the collateral on the big 100 inch screen at the end of the table. Mike was there as well and the two men were looking at the display in SPACE terminals built into the conference table.

The two men looked at their respective copies of the collateral object. Joe said, “This looks pretty good, but I’ve got a concern. You’ve got the rich content up here on the left, and the form elements on the bottom. But from the view I have, the form elements are too small…will they scale?”

“Oops”, said Mike. “I forgot to tag them correctly. Hang on.” He selected the form elements at the bottom and altered their properties to be “Human Scaled”. The form entry elements expanded on the display, causing the graphic content and the copy to resize.

“There.” Now, whatever size we publish to, the form elements will be scaled for a person to use. I also marked them as “Discardable” for devices that can’t handle input won’t display them. That’s very simple with SOA, now”. The Info Object Server just queries the device capabilities after a request for object is made and only the part of the object that works on that device goes across the net.

On the large screen, the interactive form elements appear, but now they are sized for someone to use who just walks up to them.

Amy says, “Let’s get the print going. We want it to be finishing just as they arrive.”

Joe nods. Amy opens SPACE on her side of the conference table and drags the collateral object to the conference room printer’s SPACE. The wide format, printer starts printing the paper poster version of the collateral.

The client arrives and the meeting begins. The three campaign designers and the three people from the client are all automatically accepted into the Conference Room’s SPACE and allocated display space on the conference table. Joe has reserved the vertical screen display at the end of the table for a presentation display of the collateral and the campaign. However, the bottom half of the ;large screen is reserved for video conferencing with the two client reps that could not attend in person.

Bob, one of the client reps, pulls out a phone and uses it to tell the SPACE to dial the New York and Dallas offices, using information in his contacts list. The bottom part of the screen lights up with the video conferencing of the two absent attendees.

The screen sits directly on the conference table and the other two participants are looking at a siilar screen/table combination. The video conferencing images split vertically so that each of the participants appears to be sitting on either side of an identical table that stretches through the screen.

Using contextual sensors in all the conference rooms and sophisticated, real time image processing algorithms, SPACE derives the appropriate coloring, lighting, and angles to make the video conferencing seem as real as possible. It also automatically builds an identical image of the presentation at each of the remote ends.

Joe and Amy and Mike proceed to layout their campaign strategy, showing real demos of how the campaign object will operate in its variety of target SPACEs. Amy peels the printed version of the collateral off the wide format printer they keep for the purpose and, as the piece de resistance, pulls a black box about the size of a small desktop printer from behind a screen.

“This will print the souvenir in the stores. We’ve added a CAD component to the object that will drive this fabricator. It will produce either a ring or a key fob in the shape of the kid’s version of the terminal. Non-functional, of course, but you’ll only print as many of the fobs as you actually give away, so there’s no waste.”

“Will people have a choice of color and fit?”

“Yes, the kiosk we set up will scan the finger and ask for a color choice. The fabber has the ability to jet out 24 million colors.

“Excellent. Well, we are satisfied. When will the first roll-out begin?”

“In another week. The finishing touches have been done. We are just waiting for your team’s launch date to come up. It’s already in the workflow with an auto launch date and time. The first components hit the Far East at 6am on the 19th,m then it automatically processes west around the globe. The last localized deployment will be at 6am in Honolulu the same day. “

“The translations are all done?”

“Yes, we outsource those by just allowing our translation services to acces the content. The system alters the layout for the graphic alphabets like Chinese and Thai. The RTL alphabets use slightly different layouts, but the system calculates them based on the logic and rules I specified.”

“Can we see one of those? The Thai, perhaps?”

“Sure.” Joe moved his hands over the CollaborationSpace he had open in fornt of him, specifed that Thai should be selected and caused the landscape web version to be recreated. He then touched the border frame around the result and flicked his hand toward the client.

The SPACE tereminal took the window he had gestured with and sailed it across the table from his SPACE into his client’s. It inverted the object as it did so, making sure it landed in the proper orientation for its new viewer. Thai lettering glowed on the background in the colors chosen for their cultural significance. The artwork and all designated static content was there, but the message was clear to an aware reader. This product was aimed directly at Thai consumers with their particular tastes.

Shortly thereafter, the meeting adjourned. Joe and Amy and Mike talked a bit more, Joe laying out some last minute declarative logic in the object they were all looking at and Amy changing the color just a fraction in the Japanese layout logic. Once completed, they walked out of the conference room. SPACE gently closed all there different accesses and the room went dark.

After Work
Janet walks out of her office and hails a cab. She has already received an alert on her office terminal telling her she needs to leave for dinner. Joe moved the dinner appointment reference from his SPACE into her TimeSPACE. The semantics of that appointment object have linked with her schedule and GPS-location and downloaded a set of navigation instructions to her pad.

Her pad, its small screen currently filled with her NavSPACE, simply says “Use Cab”. She could if she wanted to scroll forward through the directions now showing on her pad to see the final destination address, but she doesn’t know what restaurant is there anyway, so she doesn’t bother. Let Joe surprise her, she thinks.

Once in a cab, her pad syncs with the navigation system in the cab and the driver receivs both the destination address and instructions on how to get there. Of course, many cab drivers still elect to follow their own best known routes. They feel their experience and knowledge of traffic patterns would always result in shorter trip times. This despite several studies showing the opposite was true. Janet doesn’t worry about this though. This driver seems content to follow instructions from the nav system in the car.

Her pad, having handed context off to the cab, now zooms through NavSPACE to take her back to the memo she had been crafting in her office in her TextSPACE. But before she continues the memo, Janet scrolls her SPACE to her shared image of her daughter’s SPACE. She zooms it in a bit and can see that Ariel is chatting with someone. Janet scrolls into the chat and monitors it for a moment in Mom mode; Ariel will not be aware they are being monitored. It’s OK, she can see Ariel is talking with her girl friend Sam, “short for Samantha”, from school. Janet has SPACE transcribe the audio conversation into a NoteSPACE so the driver can’t eavesdrop. Everything is innocent though. Janet scrolls over to her MessageSpace and signals Ariel that she wants to talk a bit. Through the camera feed, Janet watches Ariel accept the call, putting Sam on hold.

“What, mom”, Ariel says impatiently.
“ I just wanted to remind you that Dad and I ae out to dinenr tonight. You’ll be OK and get dinner.”
“Yes, MOTHER”, Ariel says exasperatedly.

Looking for Work

2005-12-13T08:44:00.000Z

SO, I am now departed from my former position as a research scientist at Adobe. Consequently, I am looking for work out here in the Valley.

Of course, now is a good start-up time as well and I have lots of ideas floating around, so we'll have to see if they can be transformed. Perhaps getting back into the entrepreneurial mode is the right thing to do. Start a new firm and grow some interetng technology into a new business with a few key products. Any angels out there interested in some very wild ideas on how to use Web 2.0?

In the meantime, I am reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. Very interesting; sort of like reading William Gibson if he was on speed. Or Phillip K Dick when he was. I like this book!

Aeon Flux was an excellent movie, I thought. The story was fleshed out nicely, not left as an exercise for the viewer as in the series (which was OK for that) and the costuming was fantastic. What incredible suits and dresses!

Looking forward to King Kong.

More later
Bill

eBooks -- The Right way

2005-12-13T08:42:00.000Z

A couple weeks ago I was talking about ebooks with some folks.

What intrigues me is what it will take for ebooks to catch on. I think some very important aspects of books were ignored by previous attempts to bring out ebooks.

Here's a thought: ebooks get adopted in education because of the presence of guns in the schools.

How's that work? Guns led to no lockers...no lockers led to back packs...back packs led to back problems in children...and this leads to ebook adoption.

I do not know if that is accurate, per se...but it illustrates the chain of unintended consequences which lead to the adooption of new technologies at a social level.

Other things are important if they are to be accepted:
First...I have two rocket ebooks, but I never use them anymore. One is for me and one is for my wife. The problem I encounterd was that I could not give her a book.

Books are one of the most popular gifts in our household at holiday times. But I had no way to purchase an ebook and target it to her reader as a gift. That's an importnat feature.

In the same vein we have to ask whether ebooks need to have a physical tangible instantiation. Why? Because gifts need to be tangible.

Music has never been unabstracted in reproduction. That is, you have never been able to deliver music without a player, a device to interpret the abstract representation of music encoded as grooves on a vinyl disk, magnetic domains on tape, or pits in a CD.

Books on the other hand are unabstracted. That is, the medium is, indeed, the message...the book needs no intermediation for the human user to consume it.

So giving music has always been giving abstraction, but giving literature has not. Now, however, we want to give and deliver literature that is abstracted and that requires the intermediation of a device to interpret it. This is a significant change for many of us, making the value of an ebook less than that of a book.

When I give a CD as a present, just as when I give a book, I give a physical entity...even though it is an abstraction of the music i intend to deliver. If I am going to start giving abstractions of literature (ebooks) as presents, I will need to be able to present a physical object, just as I do with music. I need something I can wrap and put a bow on.

So ebbooks need to be available in book stores, perhaps as chips or blocks which will then be offloaded into the reader, or perhaps, they should be slivers of material we hold onto.

Now DRM plays a part in both these issues. But there are solutions. For example, if I purchase an ebook online for my wife, I should be able to just target it to her reader. But the book block i purchase at B & N may need to be encrypted in a neutral 3rd party manner that can only be moved from the block to my ebook reader through a process that leaves the block unusuable or contianing only a version encrypted for me.

This brings us to the issue of loaning books and of moving them from reader to reader. I should be able to loan an ebook as I do a real book. Of course this means being able to invalidate MY copy while validating someone else's so that only one person may have access at a time.

Another rather unrelated aspect of ebooks is the fact that we do not have a cure for presbyopia. And many of us suffer from it as we grow older.So I should have a VERY easy way for the reader to bump the font size up and down. Prefereably a pair of buttons or a jog wheel or some such one touch control. A drop down menu with mutliple selections is too inconvenient..

A backlight is, of course important, but a text-to-speech capability is as well. It would be nice to be able to read a few chapters in the evening, then listen to a few onthe way to work. Or to listen to the last chapter late at night with the lights out so as not to disturb the spouse.

All of these considerations have much more to do with the social aspects of books and ebooks than they do with the technology. Books have specific connotations and social uses attached to them. It is very important to preserve, recreate, and extend these features. If they ar lost or are made difficult in ebooks, ebooks will not succeed.

Bill
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: mike
EMAIL: mike@smick.net
IP: 216.63.0.124
URL:
DATE: 11/01/2005 07:06:36 AM
One thing that I think is important about ebooks is bookmarking that is as convenient as regular bookmarkting. Also, defaults in the ebook reader so your settings are remembered. Frankly I think a lot of people are excited about the epaper technology that has never become mainstream. It's always 3 years away, and yet we read about uses of it all the time. DRM can be really annoying, worse than regular book. I can give books away that I own, I can also resell them, motivating me to buy new ones. How does DRM work other than to the company's benefit. Despite the sneaky names, DRM often hinders the rights of the consumer. Therefore, ebook's growing popularity with some will rest on how annoying their lockdown is. If it's my belonging and I want it tangible, that means, I can do all the things just like a tangible item. give, borrow, loan, buy, sell.
-----

COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Bill McDaniel
EMAIL: mcdaniel@adobe.com
IP: 192.150.14.5
URL:
DATE: 11/01/2005 09:26:58 AM
MikeI agree with you about both points. Bookmarking should be easy and flexible (and digital dogears should leave no marks).BTW, I think e-paper (or e-ink) will be commercialized in the next few years. It HAS taken longer than desired but the technological obstacles are falling now. You can actually by electronic ink signs now from gyricon... http://www.gyricon.com/DRM is harder. I agree, I want to DO all those things with an ebook...give it away, loan it, borrow one, donate to a library, resell.The problem is that legally, the publisher powns the rights to all that. Even doing it now with paper books may be construed as a violation in some cases. But your points about the freedom to do this with books leading to more book buys is valid and we need a way to mirror that digitally.Buyin a book as a gift is omportant, but i agree..I want to be able to donate it, to loan it, to give it later. I am less sanguine about selling it, but i know I love buying old used books from bookshops.Too much DRM lockdown WILL reduce the acceptance. Publishers need to figure this oput form a long range, invest in readers, point of view, not from the point of view of a quarter's lost revenue.Now another way this may play out is that another generation may come along that is so used to the lockdown they accept it in books too(consider digital music and the inability to easily share it across iPods) .But I rather hope that, instead, we develop some equitable way of allowing the propagation of literature, books, music, and ultimately video to continue as it has. Just because something CAN be locked to the limit does not mean it SHOULD be.This is another of those social aspects which will seriously affect the acceptance of ebooks.The problem with your final line is that certainly in the new digital sense, it is NOT your BELONGING...it is, at best, your LICENSE. And this is the justification for all the lockdown. Hopefully, we find a path forward through that to an equitable social e-commerce that includes oans, gifts, and donations.

Bill

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A New Theory of Surfaces?

2005-12-13T08:36:00.000Z

I am at the Ambient Intelligence conference this week in Grenoble, France. There are some very interesting papers on what happens when you have intelligence in things around the home or office.

Emile Aarts of Philips presented a view of the future that is remarkably in sync with my own thoughts. I have to say, that, while he may be overly optimistic about timeframes for e-ink, intelligent textiles, and many other things that are coming out of Philips, Sony, nd other companies soon (just as I probably am) he does 'Get It'. I recommend his books too.

Many of the presentations, though, have to do with interactions with common objects and i have noticed a common theme. Most of these objects are actually surfaces...that is, many of the papers are about interacting with horizontal or vertical surfaces that can connect to computing resources in some manner.

There are, of course, interactions with blocks, and tools, and phones, etc...but much of the ubiquitous computing interest and the ambient intelligence work concetrates on interactions with horizontal and vertical surfaces.

This brings me to my point. Do we need a new theory of surfaces? ...a line of research (probably already underway) into how humans use vertical and horizontal surfaces in their day to day lives..

I recall thinking about this a lot when I first moved to San Jose and had to furnish an apartment from scratch...I needed SURFACES...in particular horizontal ones upon which to dump things...other than the floor.

And I thought then that diffferent cultures might think about this differently...some cultures are more at ease with using the floor for a horizontal storage surface than others...American culture really likes tables and shelves and surfaces above the floor.

Vertical surfaces such as mirrors, windows, walls, TVs and other such things are important too, but we don't seem to have a concise body of research on how they are used.

So I propose someone do some thinking and research into a Theory of Surfaces as a line of inquiry to support studies on ubiquitizing computing...integrating computing into modern life will involve integrating it into the surfaces we surround ourselves with...

Architects, interior designers, gallery owners, ethnogrpahers...we need these people to help us understand how to better use and design our surfaces.

Maybe the editors at WallPaper and Surface magazine would be interested.

Bill

Technorati Profile

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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: arno verhoeven
EMAIL: hey.arno@gmail.com
IP: 84.87.66.66
URL:
DATE: 12/02/2005 01:29:10 PM
thanks for the posting!I'm a design student in Eindhoven actually, doing a Masters degree based upon touch, and the emerging notion of AmI. I feel that exactly as you do, a theory of surfaces, or more deeper, a better theory of touch and manipulation is greatly needed before we allow engineers to put electrical probes into our coffee mugs that allow us to get weather forecasts in the morning.How do we use things? What is our emotional attachment to the materials we use? How does AmI fit into the recent fad of DIY home improvement? Can I cut a AmI shelf in two when I need it in another room? Psychologists and Physiologists still have very little idea about our sense of touch and how we extract information from it...and now we want to put sensors into everything, but I really have to ask myself, why? do I need this kind of immersion interface with my PC?Thanks for the thoughts and the chance to post mine
----------------------------------------------------------

Arno,thanks for the comment. I agree we need to have deeper studies into touch and manipulation. You lost me on the AMI reference , though. What is it? With respect to a Theory of Surfaces, I was not so much looking at issues of touch and manipulation , but at the psycosocial aspects of furnishings (although I agree, touch, feel, amnioulability, and usability all fall into this as well). I was specifically wondering about how we percieve the architectural spaces we lib=ve in and around as a series of horizontal andvertical spaces...many of which are completely innocuous and intended to be covered...with objects, artwork, devices, appliances, etc. I think you are talkinga bout taking that idea even a bit further into realms of how things feel, what we learn about them from texture and touch, etc. This is a very rich area for investigation, because you are quite correct...we know very little about how these senses provide us with a very richly communicated model of the world.There is an experiment where a blindfolded person is stimulated with a noise directly in front of, above, and behind their head, always the same distance away and always the same distance from both ears. According to theory, the person should not be able to tell where the source is because the stereo effect is exactly the same each time.However, people ARE able to determine the source direction. I suspect that it is because their SKIN is ALSO responding to the noise (hairs vibrated by the wavefront, for example) and this provides the unconcious clue to notify the brain of where in the person's cognitive world the sound is originating.Touch is such an ancient and primitie sense that many of its signals are no longer conciously percieved. for example proprioception is a part of the sense of touch, but we are seldom aware of it specifically...rather we simply feel that our mental model of our own extension into the world is accurate. And we are cognitively disturbed when we discover it is not.You are correct in thinking that this NEEDS to inform product design and usability. I do not think it does so enough as yet.

Thanks for writing...let's keep talking

Bill

A Conversation between Artists

2005-12-13T08:32:00.000Z

I attended a conversation between Andrea Ackerman (digital artist) and Ellen Ullman (author, "The Bug" and "Close to the Machine : Technophilia and Its Discontents") where the conversation was supposed to be about issues arising from the ongoing merger of humans and cybernetics. it was organized by Marcia Tanner, the curator of SJMA's Brides of Frankenstein exhibit (worth a look if you're here in SJ?

It was an interesting conversation, but was rapidly redirected into more of a discussion about artificial life and what makes things alive. Also an interesting topic.

However, a couple of things said by the conversants prompted me to think and ask some questions here. One of the objections Ms. Ullman had to the current state of Ai research was that most AI research has been directoed toward reasoning, ratiocination. Not enough, in her opinion, has been devoted to artificial emotions, to modelling emotional intelligence.

I tend to agree with this, although not with Ms. Ullman's generally pessimistic view of computing. I think that very few researchers are looking into modelling emotions and emotional intelligence.

I was also reminded of what I saw at IJCAI this year and at UBICOMP in Tokyo, this month. There is a lot of very successful research going on in vision processing, a variety of reasoning methods from case based to ontological. And let me hasten to say that, after about 30 years of research and development into AI, I am still a proponent of its possibilities.

But, what has emerged in my thinking in the past two years is a realization that these techniques, so successful in operation, are not intelligence. They might, for want of a better word, be described as artifiicial smarts.

I have been summing this up by noting that I do not solve differential equations when I catch a baseball (or navigate a room, or recognize a face, or any number of other things). Whatever I do might be modelled by a computer solving differential equations (or quadratics, or mapping features into a hyperplane) but it isn't what I do.

A researcher at University of Massachusetts said to me that he is looking for the "ghostly signature" (his term) in the data structures we use to perform these so-called AI tasks now. he has the sense that there is something else in there, a pattern, a property, something, that will unlock the door and take us from these brute force methods we use today (which work amazingly well) to something that is more akin to the processes we, as humans, actually use to accomplish those takss we call intelligent.

I find it interseting that there are many artists emerging now who wish to explore this idea as well. It will be more of an issue, perhaps, as we augment or replace more and more of our physical selves with digital components. We'll not only have to ask what makes us human, but also whether these additions to our humanity are doing things in the best or most appropriate way.

Comments?
Bill

The World Behind The Glass

2005-12-13T08:26:00.000Z

This blog is about anything that strikes my fancy. Up until recently, I was a research scientist at Adobe and these first entries are some of the text I posted there when a member of my team, Gavin McKenzie, set up the first customer facing blog. Here is the entry essay I posted that set the stage for The World Behind the Glass.

==================================================
For my first entry on this public facing blog, I wanted to re-publish a short essay I wrote a while back on how I, and I believe many others, view computing and computers. This essay is the inspiration for the name of my blog as well:

The World Behind The GlassI wrote my first program (in Fortran) in 1964 at the age of 9. My brother-in-law took me to St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas where his aerial mapping firm bought time on an IBM 1141. He showed me how to write a simple program and I wrote up something that would print the Fibonacci sequence (I had never heard of it before but it was simple to come up with and it made a LOT of cool numbers come out of the computer and was fun to watch).

At that time, I didn't think too much about what was happening in the computer. I really didn't have much of a cognitive model even though I had read the usual books about switches and relays and transistors and ferrite core memories...later, I even tried to build a memory device when I was 11.

Fast forward to 1969 and I'm 14. I am a freshman in High school and hanging with some cool Juniors and a Senior who could drive us out to Jesuit High school in North Dallas. There the Math Teacher, named Brother Orlando, let us use the Jesuit teletype hookup to a GE 255 computer. The next year MY high school would get one, but we had early access! There was something different. No cards, a paper tape could save and restore your program, and there was the teletype to print results.

And it had a window over the typeball mechanism

Something clicked. I began to sense that, behind this window, somewhere in the bowels of a machine I couldn't even see, there was a world hiding.
And by writing programs I could explore it, control it, and even create with it. I could create a virutal world within the world behind the glass. My first virtual world was, like many in 1970, Conway's Game of Life...watching those critters evolve in generation after generation printed on greenbar paper was an incredible experience.

Later, in college and in my first job in this industry in 1975 as an assistant operator, we were still using typing style interfaces (a Control Data daisy wheel terminal connected to a CDC Cyber 72 and an IBM 360 Console based on the Selectric typewriter of the day) And there again was that sense, particularly as I got my hands on an IBM 360 and started to learn systems programming, that there was a world behind the window.

We graduated to VM/370 and 3270 video terminals in 1977 and I realized it was a world behind the glass. Now watching Life evolve was a satelite movie not a series of aerial photos. Nearly lost my job when my program brought the CICS order entry system to its knees...I swear I ran it in a low prioirty partition!

That sense remains. Now, as I sit at this laptop 30,000 feet above the planet, I still have a sense that there is a mirror world, a hidden world, behind the glass of my display. My writing, my programming, my browsing, my googling are all exploratory probes into this alien and still mostly undiscover'd country.

But I also realize that the world behind the glass is being reflected in the real world as well. so sometimes I wonder...is the world behind the glass staring back and wondering about this side. As we add more and more knowledge and sense of the real world to our machines and devices, do they begin to gain a sense of the undiscover'd country that is what we call the real world?

Ain't it cool?

Bill

World Behind the Glass

2005-12-08T00:02:00.000Z

This is the re-incarnation of my public blog at Adobe, since I am no longer with them.

Watch this space as I try to migrate postings here and then create new ones from here on out

Bill