mBsLOG

Welcome to my weblog. It is an unconventional blog in that I am not planning to post daily or weekly, but only as topics of interest emerge. I enjoyed playing a little with my initials and the word blog and am amused by the fact that it is as much something I am slogging through as something I am blogging about. This listing only shows the five most recent posts.

I will try to discipline myself to keep a more or less regular set of reflections coming, but I can't promise. I have disabled commenting and discussion as it ended up being more maintainence and cleanup than I cared to deal with. That doesn't mean your comments and thoughts aren't welcome. Should you wish to comment on what I have said, I will be happy to add your comments verbatim so long as they are not spam. Simply send an email to me at Pitt -- see my home page. I will insert it in the appropriate post with attribution if you wish. Please reference the title and date of the post on which you are commenting. Also, if you want to suggest a topic that might be covered or discussed, let me know and I will try to include it.

Here is access my mBsLOG as an rss feed.

Fri, 10 Dec 2010

The Dangers of Social Networking (December 10, 2010)

I was asked recently to comment on the dangers of social networking websites like Facebook. I was reluctant to address the questions for fear the comments would be taken out of context and used in the type of media hype many academics have come to fear. I decided to move forward with the interview and the resulting news story was an acceptable translation of my comments given the context of the news story. Here is a perspective with the luxury of a more considered exposition. First, social networking is a recent phenomenon.

Facebook, which appeared in 2004, is one early effort at supporting social activity on the web. One indication of this is the rapid evolution of the interface as new strategies and techniques are tried, replaced, augmented and dropped. There will be new kinds of social networks that will emerge over the years and with time the flaws and shortcomings of early efforts will be eliminated. The two most important areas in which changes will occur will be security and customs. On the security side, techniques for defining our circle of friends and exposure of information will emerge. They will be simple to understand and implement. Regards customs, we will learn what to say and not say in this new social environment. Stories of stalking, job interviews, embarrassed individuals, arrests, etc. will slowly help each of us to understand what we should and shouldn’t say. A colleague once advised me that if I had something good to say, I should do it in writing and if I had something bad to say, I should deliver it in person orally. What we say at a cocktail party or in a bar is different from what we want to say at a meeting when newspaper reporters are present. It will take time, but we will learn. I recently asked one of my former graduate students if she had gotten married – noting a new last name on her Facebook page. She said no, she was just using a different last name for security reasons. Similarly, I read recently that the best photo for your Facebook page is that of a bald man who is deceased! It may not be particularly helpful for old bald men, but useful for many others.

I will turn to the dangers of Facebook in a second, but let me begin with what I see as some of the positive aspects of this new technology. Over the last fifty years, we have seen the growth of passive media consumption – i.e. TV, radio, music and movies have absorbed a phenomenal amount of our discretionary time. A few years ago, the time spent in passive media use began to decline for young people as they engaged in video games, phone usage, text messaging, and social networking. I take this as a positive sign that we are reengaging our social selves. More importantly, new applications of social media are being experimented with every day. I have been engaged in research on the impact of social networking (simplistically put) to deliver various kinds of educational and support services to various patient groups – e.g. individuals with various forms of cancer, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, etc. The results of the research show strong improvements in traditional medical measures for the groups addressed. You have no doubt seen early efforts at providing care at a distance provided by children for elderly parents. I have no doubt that hundreds of applications will be developed over the coming years that will make use of these new technologies to bring various social groups together.

Ok, I am a believer in social networking and I am convinced that with time, security concerns will be addressed and each of us will develop social etiquette appropriate to the new environment. But the fact of the matter is there are some dangers associated with social networking. As parents of children or as mature adults, we need to pay attention. The first danger is one of time commitment. Television viewing, or video game playing, or texting are not dangers in isolation. It is excessive use that is a danger. We might imagine that each of us has a certain amount of time at our disposal. Alexander Szalai’s study on the use of time is old now, but captures the early impacts of media on our use of time. More recently the Pew research studies on the internet provide informative indications of how our time use patterns are changing. Put simply, I would suggest that we can view social networking, or online shopping, or texting, or video gaming as taking one of three time commitments. The commitment might be reasonable – something like the amount of time we would have spent in other forms of social networking. I would go so far as to say that it might represent a net increase in the time spent socializing, especially if it begins to replace anti-social activities to which we have become addicted. The time commitment could be defined as intrusive if it prevents us from doing some of the things we would normally be expected to do. Personally, I get frustrated when household chores, or professional commitments take second place to social engagement. Finally, we could define the time commitment as disruptive if it becomes our highest priority at the expense of many things we are committed to such as work and family.

The other danger of social networking is over exposure of private information. We have all met people who spend much of their time tweeting or posting on walls. As I stated earlier, some people use pseudonyms to reduce their exposure. Others use avatars or funny photos as personal images. Yet others seem bent on exposing every aspect of their daily life without constraint. In the physical world, we constrain our comments in public in a variety of ways. We don’t talk to an interviewer in the same way we talk with our parents or children. So the second danger of social networking is inappropriate exposure of information. After a half decade, individuals have come to understand that Facebook pages are not only viewed by those for whom they are intended, but by a number of other people. There are two ways to deal with the issue of exposure. First is to very tightly control access to the information we post. Thus a social networking site that is restricted to a tightly controlled group – e.g. family members – allows us the freedom to say what we want knowing it is being viewed by only a select few. But for many this kind of social networking site is not exactly what they envisioned. Many people want to use these sites to gather together friends and casual acquaintances. In this case, it is important that people understand that those who can view what we post include four groups – those for whom we intended it (friends at college), others for whom it was not intended but who are welcome (our cousins), those for whom it was not intended but who represent no active threat (parents, police, potential employers), and those for whom it was not intended and who represent active threats (identity thieves, stalkers, etc.). We need to learn to write and post conservatively or in highly controlled groups.

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Mon, 18 Oct 2010

Our students today…(October 18, 2010)

Let me begin with an attempt to encapsulate the 30 minute discussion induced by an observation that it is hard work to teach our incoming students who sometimes lack critical basic skills. One member observed that our students don’t know how to write well. Further, it is not our job in higher education to teach writing in courses other than writing courses. Another member observed that the undergraduate students entering the University of Pittsburgh have been getting better every year based on objective measures. There were some remarks about the lack of work ethic, and then some more remarks about how remarkable some of our students are. There were observations about the failure of the primary and secondary school systems, and about parents who are not involved enough or who are too involved! Toward the end, one member made a passionate statement about the quality of the students we are graduating as measured by the graduate schools they are being admitted to. There seemed to be no conclusion, but clearly the matter was one near and dear to the hearts of many of the members.

Leaving the meeting I carried a piece of paper on which I had jotted five notes:

Changing technology
Changing demographics
The University as laboratory and museum
Competency versus comparison
Changing forms of communication

Changing Technology

I am a great fan of Herb Simon’s notion of a science of the artificial – a science of the artifacts that we create and surround ourselves with – technology. In the book, he talks about the differences between the physical, social, and artificial sciences. While his work addresses different paradigms and methods, there are some corollaries that are also of interest. For example, while the physical world is constantly changing, the rate of change is glacial compared with the social world and the social world changes glacially compared with the technological world. From the birth of powered flight to the landing on the moon was less than 70 years! We might benefit from introspection on the significance of the impact of various forms of technology on different generations.

Alan Kay is another of my heroes. He was one of the principles at Xerox PARC in the 1970’s who invented what would eventually become the personal computer we use today. The Alto, Dynabook, and Star used networks, laser printers, windows, mice, icons, bitmapped screens and the desktop metaphor. They were all developed at Xerox PARC in the late 70’s – years before the first IBM PC was sold! Kay did his testing with children because adults were too set in their ways – he wanted to work and learn from minds that were not adverse to radical new technology. Last week, I heard the scientist who had developed the simulator for the Joint Strike Fighter – the main fighter for the US for the next thirty years – saying that they were asking high school kids to try out the simulator. His rationale was that 90% of the pilots who would fly the JSF had not yet been born and he needed the input of individuals conversant with the new technology to assess it. Technology is evolving rapidly, especially the technology that is being used by young people today to communicate in new ways.

Keep in mind that writing is a technology just as is telephony, or text messaging, or video mashups. With that in mind, with great love of writing, about which I learn something new every day, and with a belief that we need to take account of, not resist new technology, I turn to Socrates as presented by Plato. Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialog on love, rhetoric, and other matters between Socrates and Phaedrus turns at one point to writing. Socrates comments:

This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. (Plato, Phaedrus 275b).

In the context of discussions and debates about our students in higher education, this observation by one of the greatest teachers of western civilization provides an interesting reminder. Each generation clings to the technology with which they are most conversant and shuns or devalues newer technologies. What will ultimately become significant new technologies may be most appreciated by the youngest generation unencumbered by tradition and training.

Changing Demographics

I wish I had a nickel for every comparison of the academic prowess of the different generations – or about the relative strengths of US versus foreign students. In a prior life I served as a director of an outreach educational effort for the University. The comparison of the students in the program against traditional students was inevitable. We convinced the Dean of the elite undergraduate college to teach a course for these non-traditional students. Inevitably, he was asked to compare the students. I was pleased to find his response consistent with my own beliefs. He said that the brightest students in each program were comparable, but that the non-traditional students were more highly motivated and were wise as well as smart. On the down side, the non-traditional students were more heterogeneous. That is, the number of poorly prepared students was greater in the open admission system. This was of course true.

Without worrying about specific numbers, imagine that less than 5% of the population went on to college 100 years ago. The entering class at an institution of higher learning was from the elite in society, whether it is based on aristocracy or meritocracy. When we include all forms of higher education today, I suspect the entering class includes over 50% of the population. The bell curve dictates that even if selective institutions try to assure the brighter students are chosen, more of those allowed to dream the dream of a higher education are closer to the average. A related observation can be made for our foreign visitors, who are often supported by competitive state scholarships. We do not see the average student from China or India. We see the intellectual elite. That the demographics of students pursuing higher education in our democracy are changing is a good thing, and it is the vision upon which we built our democracy. We should not pine for our experience of higher education only for the elite but embrace and support one that is the realization of our vision of democracy.

The University as Laboratory and Museum

It is well understood that we look to our universities as one of the key locations for research that leads to new knowledge. But there is another important function that universities fulfill. It is our responsibility to preserve knowledge. It is within the university that we can study ancient languages and cultures. The Saber-Tooth Curriculum is a wonderful little book written in 1939 by Harold Benjamin under the pen name J. Abner Pediwell. It is the tale, in the best Weberian sense, of how our academic structures are self perpetuating. Long after the hunting of saber-tooth tigers had become unnecessary in a culture transformed from hunter gatherer to agrarian, the institutions of higher learning are enhancing their PhD programs in saber-tooth tiger hunting! The university is one of the institutions in our society whose goal is not only to discover new knowledge but to preserve old knowledge.

Another perspective on the role of institutions of higher education in our society relates to preparing individuals to work in society. This matter has been eloquently addressed by a number of historians of education. At a simplistic level, we understand that when agriculture and engineering were important, and not being addressed well enough by the institutions then in existence, the land-grant universities were created to produce the engineers and agricultural researchers. Similarly, the states created normal schools to produce teachers. More recently community colleges have emerged to open access and produce individuals with a wide variety of rapidly evolving technical skills

In addition to the knowledge and skills institutions provide, they also provide a cultural indoctrination to society and its institutions. Lester Thurow has talked eloquently about capitalism and education. In a simple form, our traditional classrooms and forms of discipline are meant to prepare people for large organizations where they follow the rules and keep a regular schedule. The desks in rows, the rulers to impose discipline, the detention hall and rigid schedules produced the people needed in an industrialized society – from General Motors to the Army. Today, Google, Microsoft, GE and our other 21^st century businesses are looking for faster, leaner, more self-directed individuals capable of working in fluid situations and ad hoc structures. Are we producing these kinds of self starters or are we producing individuals for the corporations of the 20^th century? Are we shaping our students in a laboratory of the future or a museum of the past

Competency versus Comparison

We argue ad nauseum about grade inflation and the growing incompetence of our students. I was trained as an educator in an era when we thought about instructional objectives and ways to individualize instruction to the needs of students. My first job as a graduate student was working with a school district in a “non-graded middle school.” It was not that we did not assess and grade students. The idea was that students weren’t in a particular grade, but rather they had a portfolio that defined the competencies they had achieved. Taken to the extreme, the idea is that any student who gets a credential – be it a high school diploma or a master’s degree – knows certain things and has certain skills. If an individual can develop the knowledge and skills in five years, that is wonderful. If it takes thirty, that’s what it takes. If you listen carefully, you will hear this basic idea behind many of the educational reforms that are suggested for the US. Unfortunately, the extent of the change that would be required in our institutions is so significant that attempts at reform are very difficult.

Teaching graduate courses over the last 30 years, I have had the luxury of being free to teach in the way I thought best. In my case, that means that a student doesn’t complete my course until they complete a series of projects that are tied to competencies I set out for the course. In educational jargon, my evaluation mechanisms are competency based. Most of my colleagues prefer to give a mid-term and final and be done with the course. If they do include projects, they almost always grade over a fixed time period and on a curve. We are told that we want to avoid grade inflation and that is assured if we only give a percentage of our students A’s. In educational jargon, this is referred to as norm based evaluation. For a variety of reasons, I am not a fan of comparative or norm based evaluation on an imposed time schedule. I much prefer, even though it is more work for me, to say you can all get an A when you prove to me you can do these things. (BTW, I do give B’s and C’s but basically it is when the student says “I give up, give me a grade that represents that portion of the competencies that I have mastered.”) How different would the university be if we followed a competency based model universally!

Changing Forms of Communication

This reflection on students and universities ends with a return to another aspect of the theme introduced in the first point about changing technology. The reader may have noted that I focused on communication technologies more than other technologies. I want to say just a few words here about communication in a very broad context. (One of my blog entries provides a more leisurely exposition of this idea Immediacy. )

One of the things that separates humans from other species is our ability to communicate in very sophisticated forms. We evolved from grunting and pointing to spoken language 40,000-50,000 years ago. That ability to share information and knowledge accelerated the development of our species. In retrospect we call this form of communication the oral tradition. Around 6000 years ago, a new form of communication began to emerge – writing. I could spend hours weaving fictional tales about how the experts in the oral tradition must have made fun of this new fangled technology. Needless to say, writing caught on and the literary tradition was born. Writing did not supplant speaking, but complemented it. It became such an important skill that we spend years developing it in our children. With the emergence of radio in the 1850’s, some saw a new form of communication beginning to emerge. Broadcast and stored speech were referred to by some as the “second orality.” I take a broader view. Not just telecommunications, but computer and network based digital communication constitute the new communications technology. It is the totality of digital communication in all its forms that is qualitatively different from both speaking and writing. This includes everything from email to blogs to YouTube to Twitter. I am convinced that rich and as yet unrefined forms of communication will emerge making use of this technology.

If we discovered that we had a new and better way to communicate rich messages more easily, wouldn’t we adopt the new practice, maybe at the expense of developing better writing skills? I think so. Writing did not put an end to speaking, and the new era, which I have had the audacity to label “immediacy”, will not supplant writing and speaking, but add a new complementary form. New forms of communication based on digital technology are going to emerge, and we should not be disappointed that some uses of writing are replaced by new forms of digital communication just as some forms of oral communication were replaced by a written equivalent. When I seem to hear a refrain from Socrates – “This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory” – I am grateful that Plato chose to use that new technology to share his mentor’s observation.

Conclusion

There is more that I would like to weave in about my experiences with my children, my nieces and nephews who range in age from 16 to 50, and the 1000’s of students I have taught. My overarching conclusion “about our students” is that they are wonderful, smart, powerful, knowledgeable and competent. Lots of things are changing, but in the last analysis our students are moving forward and they are every part our equals. Regarding the university, to my colleagues, I would say “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, or maybe “we have met the enemy and the enemy is us.” Technology and the future are challenging us to modify and update the social institution of higher education to which we are dedicated. We may not need to change a lot, but we do need to think about what we are doing during one of the most exciting periods in the evolution of human civilization.

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Thu, 07 Oct 2010

Half Way There (October 7, 2010)

There was an announcement last week that the library at the University had demonstrated an on-demand printing press capable of printing and binding books on demand. (The system is the “Expresso Book Machine” -- http://www.ondemandbooks.com/) It is interesting that during the very same period when e-books first outsold p-books at Amazon, we would find a news story about on-demand printing! Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/amazon-more-e-books-than-hardcovers) reported in July of 2010 that they had sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books over the course of the second quarter, and the rate is accelerating. While this event had shock value for news organizations, it is important to note, as Wired also reported, that the overall e-book market is still small compared to traditional publishing. According to Publisher’s Weekly, e-books sales were less than 1 percent of the print equivalents last year, with e-books accounting for about $188 million in sales compared to an overall book market of $35 billion in 2009.

All of this is of particular interest because of my long interest in electronic printing and publishing. In 1984, I lead a project with funding from the Annenberg Foundation and support from the Xerox Corporation to develop custom textbooks to accompany a television series called Planet Earth. The project had several interesting aspects, but the one I was most involved with was the preparation and publication of the textbook for the telecourse. I suggested to the funding source that the problem with telecourses was that they mandated that all of the institutions offering a course in conjunction with the TV series use the same text. In general, faculty resist not having the text of their choice. I proposed that we would develop a set of components that could be assembled into many different cohesive texts on demand. What was proposed was much more than assembling big blocks.

In the last analysis, we constructed a database of components that could be woven together so as to create thousands – in theory millions of different textbooks. Faculty could specify discipline foci, themes, complexity, or ultimately select each individual component. Once they had made their decisions, the components were collected and structured into a seamless textbook. For those unfamiliar with this kind of custom electronic publishing of complex books, consider some of the complications in constructing such a textbook. A simple problem is the construction of the various tables of contents and the index. For each book produced, these structures will be unique. How many chapters there are and what page an index entry will point to changes. At a more complicated level is the forward reference. Text books contain lines like “see Figure 7.6 on page 328”. This requires that we know in advance that the figure being referred to will be on page 328, be the sixth figure in the chapter and the chapter will be the eighth. This presents a significant processing problem when the contents are dynamic. We even need to account for the possibility that the section that contains the figure of interest has not been selected! It took almost two years to solve all the research issues but we managed. We produced more than 1000 different textbooks which were then reproduced by the participating institutions for their students. We were proud of what we had accomplished despite the fact that the cost/original, given the overall project budget, was close to $250/master or about $.50/page. Processing required a powerful mainframe computer and the biggest laser printer Xerox then made. Total time for composition and printing was a little under and hour. The system that was demonstrated last week was cheaper and faster by an order of magnitude. At the same time, the system simple printed a book that had already been composed and stored in memory. The on-demand nature of the process has been perfected. The custom nature of the process is still lacking – we are only half way there.

When we completed the Planet Earth project, I looked for funding, unsuccessfully, to carry the work forward. My vision was one where databases of information might be tapped to create one up books tailored to individuals. Given the expense of producing these books, I looked for situations where the cost might be considered insignificant. One of the ideas was to produce “orientation guides” for new hires and transfers within a corporation. Imagine that “Joe” is to be transferred from Rochester to Dallas within a corporation and will work as a manger in a new division. Joe will need to buy a house that is in the kind of school district that meets his family needs and that is situated in the kind of neighborhood the family wants. He will need to learn where to shop, how to get around, what his new office environment will be, who he will be working with, what their skills are, etc. Even in 1985, we had growing digital sources for much of this data. If we could bring a transfer or a new employee up to speed a month faster, that would represent a significant savings to the corporation. While we were unsuccessful in securing funding to pursue this kind of project, others did similar things. For example, the Department of Defense implemented documentation requirements for major weapons systems that resulted in custom documentation for each instance. (Military platforms often have a multi-decade life time, and over time, as each instance is augmented, it develops a unique profile. Put more concretely, as Abrams M1A1 tanks are upgraded and modified, it gets to the point where the tanks are very different from each other.)

An ultimate vision for custom on-demand publishing might imagine a unique text book for each student based on an intelligent assessment of their learning preferences and needs. People learn in different ways and they have different prerequisite knowledge and skills. Imagine a textbook that provides just what the student needs and nothing they don’t. Further imagine that the presentation is such that matches the students learning style. (You might also imagine how this would make teaching more difficult. It would no longer be so easy to say read pages 35-92!) What a wonderful experience it would be for students to have materials that were not too basic or too advanced or written in ways they can’t understand. Computer and information scientists are continuing to work on these issues. Personalized and adaptive systems are getting more and more sophisticated, even if they are still limited in scope and functionality. It is exciting to see the fruition of practical on-demand publishing systems, even it took 30 years to progress from research experiments to practical applications, but we are only half way there. The shift from mass production publishing to on demand publishing only realizes it full potential when it is not only on-demand, but custom.

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Tue, 14 Sep 2010

Advising PhD Students (September 14, 2010)

Advising PhD students can be difficult. At this level, they need to discover ways of working, learning, conducting research that come from within themselves. I find, most often, that the advice centers around one of two themes. I believe the advice may be useful to working professionals as well.

The first theme has to do with blending action and planning, and it consists of two pieces of advice and a caveat. The first piece of advice is this: “don’t just stand there, do something.” The second piece of advice is “don’t just do something, stand there.” The caveat is that you need to learn when to follow which piece of advice. For the student who can’t write the first page of their dissertation proposal, and who is thinking about all the possibilities and all the issues, the advice is “don’t just stand there, do something.” I remind them that they don’t have to start writing with the first sentence. Indeed, it is perhaps easiest to write the first sentence last. As a student begins to write their proposal they should begin with something that is specific, provable, and important. Don’t worry about where it will fit. Writing a research article or a proposal for funding often involves ten or more drafts, and I have found that I often throw out half of what I write. It is a good feeling to reduce an entire paragraph to a clear concise and well defined sentence. Particularly when we are not yet clear in our own mind what we want to say, or how we want to focus the research, a path to productivity can be to write down what we are sure of and worry later about how we will fit the pieces together. Same is true for other kinds of projects. The key here is to understand when the enormity of some project is preventing any progress. Start anywhere, get the pieces out on paper. Later you can organize them into a coherent whole, throw away the junk, refine the good pieces, and add the pieces that are missing.

[A minor digression related to writers block: I remind PhD students that generally speaking, I can cut out the beginning of most dissertations with no loss of content. Many students will begin papers or proposals with meaningless lines like – “Over the last few years the world wide web had become an important part of the way we exchange information” or some such drivel. Actual first lines, of recent dissertations (not from my students, and not credited to protect the authors) have included such as: “Today’s information environment is getting much more complex day after day. The new medium such as the World Wide Web is unprecedented to any other information resources that have existed in human history in term of its size and its speed of growth.” or “The vision of the Semantic Web provides many new perspectives and technologies to overcome the limitation of the WWW. Ontologies are a key component to solve the problem of semantic heterogeneity, and thus enable semantic interoperability between different web applications and services.” These lines can be removed from a dissertation without loss of content!]

In contrast to the first piece of advice, it is sometimes important to stop and think about what you are doing. “Don’t just do something, stand there.” For example, in dissertation research, good research is often distinguished by the lack of surprises in the results of the work. This occurs when the researcher walks through the research imagining what will happen. They can see the subject arrive. They can anticipate both what they hope will happen and what they hope will not happen. Sometimes this occurs as a result of carefully planned pilot studies, but a good mental walk through can often accomplish a lot. What kinds of numbers will be produced? How will the equations into which I will plug the numbers operate? What will the statistics look like? How will I deal with anomalies. Similar advice can be given to students who are working on software development. When I am done, what is it I hope to achieve? What kinds of functionality to I want to provide? Where can I save time by modularizing the code? Too many times, novice programmers today focus on copying and modifying code found on the web. They don’t fully understand how it works, or why it was structured the way it was. They simply know it does something close to what they need. They butcher it and rewire it until it is an unrecognizable bowl of spaghetti code. If we are going to spend 100 or 1000 hours on a project, a little thinking up front about where it is headed and what we want to accomplish can go a long way to preventing missteps, or at least to alerting us when they are looming.

[Digression 2: There are many stories about legendary programmers. The one I am familiar with had to do with a coding genius who haunted our labs in the early seventies. He and is colleagues were given tasks on a research project. The others coded extensively over the three months of the project, testing and revising the code numerous times. Chris, the legend, did no coding. As the deadline approached, the worried PI asked again and again how things were going. About a week before the project was to be completed, Chris began typing and continued for three days. When he was done, he added his modules to the others for final testing. His code was perfect, clean, clear, and parsimonious. It ran without failure. He had spent three months visualizing the program and what it would accomplish and only three days typing the actual code.]

The second theme has to do with scientific passion. It comes to the surface most often related to PhD students preparing for and carrying out their dissertation research. The advice is as follows: “Find something that you are passionate about and learn to work on it dispassionately!” The path to a dissertation has many landmines. It is essential that you have a passion to learn about some matter that is sufficiently strong to see you through the dark days, failed experiments, and collegial criticism. It is not sufficient to find a topic that you might be passionate about or that you could be passionate about. It must be something that you are passionate about. Once you have found such a topic, it is easy to put in the long hours and to see feed back and criticism as useful and productive. However, passion introduces a new potential problem. You have a belief, or a hope, or a desire to demonstrate something. Your research most likely seeks to prove that something is true. Just as love is blind, so to can passion cause us to ignore reality. A recent example involved a young researcher studying an application of visualization to information processing. They were convinced that visualization would improve information processing, and when the results were less than conclusive, they came close to invalidating the research by biasing the subjects, with their enthusiasm, during a training session. When the data failed to show what they wanted to see, they struggled to find some data of significance that would allow them to say what they wanted to say. Having had a student who suffered a similar experience many years ago, I asked if they could imagine why they were not getting the results they had hoped for. I asked how long they had been using the system. “Two years.” I asked how long the training and experiment took. “Two hours.” I asked if they thought that maybe the improvement in information processing making use of the visualization was dependent on training and use. The long and short of the story is that I believe they were passionate about what they were doing, and I think the passion was well founded. Unfortunately, they had missed a piece of the puzzle –if they had just stood there for a while, they might have realized that there would need to be a longer training period before they began to see the results they were looking for. In the last analysis they endangered the integrity of their research findings by lacking the discipline to be dispassionate about the results of their work.

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Tue, 15 Jun 2010

Reflections on Computing, Networking, and the Web (June, 2010)

It is always difficult to predict what our digital future holds. The World Wide Web took us by storm. The emergence of e-books was long predicted, but still arrived suddenly. Social networking is still emerging and morphing. This entry is a long reflection on what has been with an eye to seeing if a look in the rearview mirror offers any clues as to a trajectory. The few conclusions at the end are no where near as much fun as the process of trying to see if we can detect anything about likely trajectories by looking at where we have been. We begin with a look at the broadest picture – computing and networking. We move on to look at the internet, and finally review the explosion of the World Wide Web. I conclude with a few observations that I believe are supported by the historical facts.

A selective history of computers and networking.

Looking at this broad, but selective timeline of computing and networking, I have tried to highlight a couple important events. While we are a full decade into the second half of the first century of computing, there is still some utility in reflecting on the difference between the first and second halves of the century. The reason for begging this indulgence has to do with “incunabula” and the book “Beyond Calculation” by Denning and Metcalfe, which was published in 1998 to celebrate the actual 50^th anniversary of computing.

Incunabula is a term used by librarians to refer to books produced between 1453 and 1500 – the first half century of the disruptive technology of moveable type mass production printing. Incunabula books are remarkable in the degree to which they differ from each other and what we think of as books today. They were experiments. Indeed, the term incunabula is more broadly defined as any art or industry in the early stages of development. So we may think of what happened during the first half century of computing as computing in its early stages with lots of experimentation.

Denning and Metcalfe put together a wonderful compilation of articles in “Beyond Calculation.” The title provides a cornucopia of overlapping meanings. The most interesting is the observation made by several contributors that the era of computers that calculate is giving way to an era in which calculation is giving way to communication, collaboration, and coordination. We are in a period of significant experimentation and we are finding uses beyond calculation for this disruptive technology.

I observe three things using my fractured timeline. First, the Web is barely 20 years old, and for most people 10-15 might be more accurate and thus it is more bound by incunabula phenomenon than computing and networking. Second, while few things stand the test of time in this realm, the “desktop” is a notable exception. I am an unabashed fan of Xerox PARC, and always remind students that C. Peter McCullogh charged the first Director of PARC, George Pake with inventing “the information architecture of the office.” Out of that challenge came many things, but foremost was the “Alto” and the subsequent “Star” personal computers. And of all the innovations made manifest through these machines, a case can be made for the greatest being the WIMP (windows, icon, mouse, pointer) interface and the “desktop metaphor”. This is the same desktop, that you are sitting at today, more than 30 years later. We use programs hung on this metaphor to process information – to communicate and collaborate. Third, while predictions of exact trajectories vary, there is still solid support for Moore’s law – a continued doubling of computing power every 18 months or so. Every time I use my Droid X, marvel at the 1 Gigahertz device in my pocket that “doubles” as a phone and is always connected via four different networking technologies – wi-fi, 3G, Bluetooth, and GPS. In 2025, some suggest the personal device, which will likely rely on the grid, will have the storage capacity and processing capability of a single human. Around 2050, the optimists suggest it could have the capabilities of a community of 3000 humans. Even if we don’t reach quite this far, it is likely that my personal device will operate a series of agents operating around the clock on my behalf. Even if they are all idiot savants, I see them as at least capable of managing my calendar, knowing my travel preferences, keeping track of what I write, doing basic searches for me, etc. (I find it hard to imagine any way that I will be able to keep 3000 specialized assistants busy.)

So, the broad picture is one of immensely powerful personal assistants working to help me communicate, collaborate, coordinate, and calculate in such a way that they operate beyond the vision of Vannevar Bush as a intimate supplement to human memory, and dare I say, intellectual activity.

The evolution of the internet

The growth and development of the internet is more difficult to track. The theory behind a packet switched network was laid out in the 1960s. The first nodes of what would become the internet were actually put in place as part of Arpanet beginning in 1969. The protocols that would become essential do the development of the packet switched network were developed through the 1970s – telnet in 1972, ftp in 1973, NCP in 1974, and SMTP(mail) in 1977. NCP was replaced by TCP/IP in 1982 and DNS was introduced in 1984. The World Wide Web (WWW) was released by CERN in 1991 and took off with the first graphic browser – Mosaic – in 1993.

During the 1990s, things changed rapidly. We forget now about gopher and newsgroups, but they had their day. Early on file transfer dominated in terms of packets on the internet, with telnet connection packets being second, and mail third. It is a little hard to trace the growth of mail, but the phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is clearer. Web (http) traffic exceeded telnet packets in 1994 and ftp in 1995. Andrew Odlyzko’s 2003 paper on “Internet Traffic Growth” provides a balanced perspective on internet growth. He estimates that from 1990-1994 traffic about doubled every year from 1.0TB in 1990 to 16.3TB in 1994. Data for 1995 was not available, but by 1996 it had risen to 1500TB – the WWW explosion. He documents an ongoing growth rate of near 100% per year from 1996 through 2002 – from 1500TB to around 100,000TB. Obviously, both the WWW and P2P protocols were largely responsible for this growth. Further analysis shows SMTP traffic (estimated based on partial data) to have doubled about 4.5 times in 10 years. During roughly the same time, http traffic doubled 9 times! In 1994, mail traffic accounted for 16% of internet traffic and the web accounted for virtually none. By 2003, mail traffic had dropped to less than 2% and web traffic had increased to almost 50%.

The number of mail and web packets moved continues to increase at a rather amazing rate, i.e. there are more http packets this year than last. At the same time, given the totality of the bandwidth available, new applications are absorbing a larger percentage. The graphic below, published in wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/) is based on data from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis presents an interesting overview of the trends.

What does this suggest about the future? I think it suggests a couple things. It would seem reasonable to believe that we will continue to find new uses for the internet, which continues to grow at an astonishing rate. This network bandwidth has allowed us to begin to embrace a network centric model of computing. The desktop no longer needs to be a storage facility. Streaming gigabytes of data to watch a movie has become cheaper than mailing a DVD or driving to a store to pick it up. Music and video packets now crowd the internet based on both P2P and video outlets. Communication and entertainment applications absorb a growing percentage of the bandwidth with video alone accounting for more than half of all internet traffic in the US! While the number of packets devoted to the WWW continues to grow in absolute numbers, they have begun to decrease as a percentage of the total packets.

The evolution of the World Wide Web

The graphic above attempts to show a couple different things. First, all of the technologies in yellow are non-web technologies. While most are internet technologies, I have included other seminal developments that have in one way or another influenced the development of the internet. The web gave birth to websites, links, tags, and wikis. These base capabilities were subsequently mashed up into Friendster, Wikipedia, and a variety of other collaborative efforts. The traditional web is being replaced by the social web. We spend relatively less “web time” searching for information (Google) and relatively more time sharing with friends (Facebook).

I am reluctant to say where the web is heading, but it would seem fair to suggest three simultaneous trends that will grow in a complimentary fashion. First, the web as a vast information store is not going to go away. It will continue to grow. While not as evident, the “semantic web” is slowly taking form – consider the special sections of structured information available in Wikipedia. Finally, it is very clear that a new “social web” is growing by leaps and bounds. This web provides rich new venues for communication and collaboration.

Conclusion

The psychologists have suggested various base motivations for humans. These include all the classic views from Freud to Adler to Maslow. There are several less well known views such as those of Viktor Frankl who makes a compelling case for a “will to meaning”. Johan Huizinga makes a compelling case in his book “Homo Ludens” for man the game player.

It is not hard to imagine story telling as a fundamental human motivation, and I suspect that there a scholarly work somewhere that draws a more complete picture. There is no doubt that humans are driven to communicate. This is what makes us different than all other species. This is what gives us an advantage. The disruptive technology of our time, computers and networks provide us with an opportunity to make unprecedented improvements in how we communicate. In 1959, Teilhard de Chardin’s The Future of Man was published. It consists of a compilation of pieces he wrote over the years including one on the development of global consciousness. On page162, Teilhard observes:

I am thinking of course, in the first place of the extraordinary network of radio and television communications which, perhaps anticipating the direct syntonization of brains through the mysterious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of “etherized” universal consciousness.

But I am also thinking of the insidious growth of those astonishing electronic computers which, pulsating signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second, not only relieve our brains of tedious and exhausting work, but, because they enhance the essential (and too little noted) factor of “speed of thought,” are also paving the way for a revolution in the sphere of research.

Teilhard’s philosophy/theology puts great stock in the ability of humans to be conscious of each other and the world. Communication and awareness are what most distinguish us as humans, and we strive to become more aware and more interconnected with each other. If there is a leitmotif in the story of the evolution of computing, networking, and the web, it is that we will support and encourage the development of the technology in ways that better enable us to communicate and increase our awareness of our world and other humans.

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Mon, 15 Feb 2010

How do Standards Come About?(February 15, 2010)

With the emergence of new markets in Europe and Asia, there has been a renewed interest in standards. Part of the reason for this renewed interest in standards is that there are new players and standards are being used in new ways. Specifically, Europe and China are playing a bigger role in the development of standards. Simultaneously, standards are being used more frequently as a mechanism that impacts trade. One question that has been raised is how standards come about.

One answer to this question is that they just appear. It is clearly not the case that they magically appear. Perhaps it is better to say that there is no formal standardization effort. As an example of this, consider Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF document formats. Obviously both Microsoft and Adobe would like to dominate the markets within which they operate and they work hard toward that goal. If Microsoft is successful, which in large part they have been with the Office Suite, Word becomes a dominant format for the exchange of documents. It emerges, without concerted standardization effort, as a standard to which everyone adheres.

Under this condition, nobody decides anything. The standard emerges from market conditions. We just happen to notice one day that people nod as a way of greeting, or people decide to call the process of making a copy of something "Xeroxing". De facto standards vary in their saturation/adoption/penetration and in their longevity.

The second way a standard comes about is by intent. At the most global level, An (A)gent decides that some (G)ood will accrue to some (C)onstituency if some (P)rocess or product is codified. As one might quickly surmise, each of the factors may be further and better defined. Under the intentional condition, (A)gents with the "right" to take action (government, business, professional societies, etc.) will be more or less powerful, more or less licensed, etc. Similarly the decision that something is (G)ood will be more or less significant, more or less shared, e.g, fewer people will die, a business will grow, people will be better served, etc. It is also true that the (C)onstituency may be of different sizes(world, nation, organization, family, etc) and with respect to the Good, more or less homogeneous, e.g. occupational health may be a less widely shared concern globally than prenatal care. Finally, the (P)rocess or (P)roduct may be more or less amenable to standardization, be in a quasi standard form already, etc.

Determinants of standardization can then be derived at various levels of sophistication and complexity dependent upon variations in the values of A, G, C, and P. Consider a couple simple examples:

If the active "(A)gent" is questioned as the legitimate authority, standardization becomes more difficult. Consider just two examples. When does the government have a right to define standards? While we might agree that the Federal Government has the right to define standards for interstate commerce, we might not agree that they have the right to define cryptography standard for banking. This makes it more difficult to impose dejure standards. Similarly, if 5 companies make product X and 3 want to standardize and 2 don't, the authority may be lacking.

As the "(C)onstituency" gets bigger, standards become more difficult. It is more difficult to create a world wide standard than a National standard than a State standard etc. It is pretty easy to define an organizational standard, etc, etc. Even when a global standard is desirable, national interests, commercial or military, may mitigate against it.

The magnitude of “(G)ood” derived from a standard is also a significant force. Few would argue against a standard for automobile safety or fire protection. It is less clear that there is agreement about the good derived from a ban on smoking in public places. The benefits that accrue in a business sense are less clear to the general public, but may be easier to quantify between corporate entities involved.

Finally, the complexity of the “(P)rocess” (or product) also impacts the ease of standardization. It is more difficult to standardize larger and more complex products and processes than it is to standardize smaller systems. Indeed, many larger systems are layered so that multiple standards can more easily be developed.

All of this said, we are still talking in vague generalities about these factors in isolation. There are interactions among the factors and they are all in play at the same time. At a first cut, how might we envision these relationships? Without endeavoring to quantify any of the values, the general nature of the formula for the Difficulty of Standardization, or DOS is along the following lines (where w,x,y,z are all values greater than +1.0):

DOS = (w*C + x*P)/(y*A + z*G)

Thus, when the size of the constituency grows or the complexity of the product or process increases, the difficulty of standardization increases. In contrast, as the magnitude of the social or commercial good increases or the legitimacy of the agent of standardization increases, the difficulty of standardization decreases. Establishing coefficients and units of measurement is no trivial task, but I believe the shape of the equation has some validity.

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