July 12, 2008
Squirreling for SAP
Bob Cringely has a nice hand with metaphors, and his SAP/Squirrel analogy does it for me (though I have a sneaking feeling that if GuiXT really had been THAT simple, the cat would have been out of the bag a long time ago.) The truth, methinks, is that understanding what those numbers mean is just hard, no matter what, and no amount of interface fiddling is going to change that.
Anyway, time to recount (and probably repeat) my favorite SAP joke:
SAP is a new basic element, but contrary to other basic elements, which go from solid to liquid to gas as they heat up, SAP has a different cycle. It starts out as a liquid: You pour it into a hole in the business - where functionality and control is lacking - and it fits perfectly as you install it. Next, it goes into gas form, expanding until it fills the whole business as you add modules.
Then it becomes a solid, hard to change, so you have to shape new business processes around it.
(ba-da-bam.)
Posted by Espen at 07:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 11, 2008
Serendipity, researchwise
Mary B. has this account of finding interesting material bound with another book from the library - and then discovering that all the stuff was available through Google Booksearch. Which raises the point - how to we make the serendipity often found in research (go into any library and look at the books next to the one you are looking for) in an electronic context?
Online newspapers (as well as domain squatters) face this challenge every day - not just serving what the customer wants, but also something they didn't know they wanted, often sufficiently similar that it may be, if not a substitute, at least a diversion.
Perhaps Google should have a new subcategory on their result screen - an appropriately random link under the heading of "and now, for something completely different..."
Posted by Espen at 02:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
WSJ Cucumber season
George Will describes how beer was essential as a water purifier and human selection mechanism as the world urbanized and industrialized. This, of course, is different from Clay Shirky's theory that rising alcohol consumption came because people had too much time on their hands and needed to burn off surplus synapses.
Personally I think it was the more mundane effect of lower unit cost due to more centralized production to serve a denser urban market, but who am I to spoil an interesting theory during cucumber season....
(Via Volokh. Who adds that wine, not beer, founded our civilization. I am tempted to quote Gandhi, who, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied that he thought it was a good idea.)
I need a beer. Need to feel more civilized....
Posted by Espen at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 08, 2008
Bow ties for self-confessed geeks
The traditional geek (or nerd) attire usually includes a bow tie, and since not many people wear them anymore (though some pretty interesting people did), I suppose any 
bow tie, taken seriously, is a geek bow tie. According to my good friend Bill Schiano, there are only four professions allowed to wear bow ties: Lawyers, physicians, academics - and circus clowns (more on this here.). Initially I wore bow ties in deference to my two academic mentors, Jim and Benn, the latter who refers to his bow tie wearing as a "cheap way of earning distinction" among other reasons. Now I wear them because, well, I got used to them. Beats fashion, and according to the New York Times, the bow tie is back this year. That's the great thing about being obstinate about your wardrobe - sooner or later everything will be in vogue again.
Incidentally, the only real bow tie is a self-tied bow tie. Instructions here. Make sure you don't tie it too perfectly, though - slightly askew is the thing, aim for rakishness bordering on the sloppy, an at all cost avoid the pre-tied curse.
As all geeks know, the Internet is shaped like a bow tie, which is another reason for wearing them. At least it used to be, though this figure is Web 1.0, created before blogs and social software became prevalent. I assume a more current version would have a beefier knot.
Anyway, for a true geek - where do you get your bow ties, and what kind? There are lots of companies, but most of them sell the boring formal ones, the preppy ones or things you would not be caught dead in. My personal favorite is the Beau Ties company, a small outfit in Maine which produces good quality ties in interesting patters. Here is a selection for the geekily inclined:
One of my personal favorites (actually, my favorite bow tie, adorning my web page) is based on the geekiest artist of them all, M. C. Escher (and if you don't know why, that is because you haven't studied the mandatory literature). This one is called the Escher blue, there are many other varieties, but I like the color as well as the intricate design:
Here is one for the Boingboing kind of geek/nerd, a space invaders pattern:
More Escher, this is the classic fish-duck-lizard pattern:
Here is one called "greyhounds", also Escher:
This one is a design based on a MOSFET diagram:
Lest this turn into a Beau Ties advertisement, here is an introduction to the weird world of the wooden bow tie (repeated piano warning). Shown below is a dark stripe version, made from maple/walnut and other woods. (Since this is not a self-tie, it is a no-no for me, though.) A few years ago there was a company selling bow ties made out of clear acrylic (kind of like plexiglass) with inserts in them (barbed wire, for instance), but they seem to have folded:
A side effect of bow ties is that they provoke people, something I have found to be true on panels and other discussions, even on TV. It helps your argument because your opponent is busy looking at your neckwear and you can surprise by being more reasonable than people thought possible. I may backfire if you take yourself seriously and get Jon Stewart as a visitor (video), but overall the effect is good, methinks. Besides, your students will remember you, even if you don't.
Posted by Espen at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 02, 2008
Google and network externalities
Here is a bunch of links about Google that I have had lying around for a while - trying to think about the first one and to what extent Hal Varian is right about Google not having a network externality competitive advantage. I think he is wrong, but why is hard to articulate.
So, here goes (note that Google, rather nicely, includes a list of links to each blog post, which is fodder for further discussion):
- Hal Varian: Our secret sauce, arguing that Google's competitive advantage is due to experience and innovation, not network externalities.
- Tom Evslin: Sitemaps and how the rich get richer: Essentially, Google has an advantage because they are the biggest and people adjust their web sites to the Google engine and its various algorithmic quirks.
- Hal Varian: Why data matters. Brief overview of search and PageRank.
- Hal Varian: How auctions set ad prices. Brief explanation of Google's auction system for ads. One interesting effect, not mentioned here, is that the more precisely the user can describe the targeted population, the lower the ad price - thus, Google has both an incentive to make targeting imprecise (to have enough actors competing for a particular keyword/target) and an incentive to make it precise (to increase click rates).
- Marissa Mayer: A peek into our search factory. Various presentations, with notes, about the infrastructure underlying Google's various offerings.
- Udi Manber: Introduction to Google search quality. Overview of what Google does to fight spam, increase precision, and other things. (Reads like a transcript of a talk.)
Here are two articles that everyone trying to understand Google should read (come to think of it, this blog post is starting to resemble the layout for a class):
- Brin, S. and L. Page (1998). The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Seventh International WWW Conference, Brisbane, Australia. (The classic on PageRank.)
- Ghemawat, S., H. Gobioff, et al. (2003). The Google File System. ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, ACM. Description of the architecture of Google's index, a file system geared for few writes and very many reads, redundancy, and low response time. PDF here.
Posted by Espen at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 01, 2008
A dose of tail reality
The long tail doesn't work, according to Anita Eberle. Chris Anderson, rather sportingly, likes the article but begs to differ when it comes to determining how long that tail should be.
Maybe it is a tall tail?
Posted by Espen at 12:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 24, 2008
Seagulls and Pixar
This review (by Michael Hirschhorn) of a new book on Pixar contains the best sentence I read today: "[Intellectual property lawsuits] follow successful entertainment businesses the way seagulls trail fishing boats."
Anyone else remember the "bert, bert, bert"* "mine, mine, mine" seagulls in Finding Nemo? Imagine them with briefcases.....
Posted by Espen at 12:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
June 23, 2008
Wikipedia maturing
Nick Carr is snarky about Jim Wales' new slogan for Wikipedia ("the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any encyclopedic topic,") as opposed to the previous free-for-all. But he misses the point: Any business or endeavor with strong network externalities goes through phases of growth, and Wikipedia is now transitioning from "need stuff" to "need better stuff".
My Master and executive students have been editing Wikipedia as part of their courses for 5 years. The comment when we started was "boy, this is fun". Now it is "it is really hard to create new articles, we either get shot down or the topic is already covered." Life is easier in the Norwegian version (170K entries) than in the English one, where norms are nailed down and text quality, at least on any substantial entry, is high.
Progress, the revolutionaries become the incumbents, life goes on, etc., etc.
Posted by Espen at 07:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 22, 2008
Sort of simulated
This interesting article in the Economist shows how American politics is becoming increasingly polarized partially because when people move, they locate in areas with similar cultural preferences - be it granola or shotguns. When I lived in the States, I was always fascinated by the difference between Vermont (Birkenstock and yogurt country) and New Hampshire (main business: roadside hubcap emporiums). As it turns out, this split between liberal and conservative is happening all over the country, and you end up with the curious situation where the United States from the melting pot evolves into a salad, with rather few ingredients.
All this is interesting, but hardly relevant for technology, no? As a matter of fact, not: I am currently working on a research project with nGenera, called BST: Putting Business Simulation Technologies to Work. Simulation allows us to see the aggregate effect of many small decisions.
One of the early books showing the importance of this is Mitchell Resnick's Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. In this book, Resnick demonstrates a number of simulations programmed in StarLogo (a parallel version of Logo, a programming language originally created for children.)
One simulation in particular (caveat: this is from memory, my numbers may be wrong here) is pertinent to the polarization of America: The effect of weak preferences on clustering. Resnick constructs a 100 x 100 matrix where each cell is inhabited by either a black or white dot. Each dot can "think" (i.e., have preferences) for itself, and the simple preference each dot has is the unless it is living in a neighborhood with at least two of its own kind ("neighborhood" defined as the 8 cells sharing a side its own cell) it will move, randomly, to somewhere else. Note that this is not a strong preference: A dot of one kind will happily inhabit a cell where 6 of its neighbors are different, as long as two are the same. (A more thorough description, with images, is here.)
In a surprisingly short time, the initially well distributed matrix transforms into clear clusters (even bands) of white or black. Importantly, this process, when viewed from a distance, seem to be conscious, yet the relatively mild preference exhibited by each individual dot seems rather harmless. It may be tempting to ascribe the segregation to some conscious plot, failed policy or other single cause. It is a very powerful demonstration of the aggregate and cumulative effect of small decisions and weak preferences - and simulation is the only way to make it apparent.
Resnick's book shows similar uses of simulations to understand ant foraging strategies and traffic jam formation - and some of the insights have been put into use in real life. For instance, traffic lights at on-ramps that introduces cars into traffic flow in an even stream rather than random groups is, as far as I know, a direct result of simulations of traffic jam formation.
In science, business and politics, we are moving from isolating single factors and varying them to understanding interaction patterns between many small components. Simulation allows us to understand this - the challenge lies in understanding where and how this very powerful tool can give insights.
And there you have Vermont and New Hampshire, Virginia and Maryland: The results of weak preferences over time. Perhaps we could simulate some real political discussion at some point?
Posted by Espen at 12:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
June 20, 2008
Disrupted presentation at Open Nordic
Here (PDF) is my presentation from Open Nordic 2008.
My experience at this conference - the audience was interested and had good questions, by the way - was rather unnerving. As is my wont, I was sitting in the audience listening to the speaker before me, fiddling with my own presentation (I have found that starting for or against the previous speaker when you are late in the day in a conference helps the audience anchor what you are saying. Plus, sitting in on the previous speaker gives you an idea about what the audience wants.)
Anyway, I had saved my presentation, and when the other speaker had finished, I pulled out the power cable from my Lenovo X61 Tablet laptop to walk up and check that it would work with the projector.
And then my laptop just died. No sign of life, no reaction when cycling power, no reaction when taking out the battery, nothing. Dead as the proverbial doornail. My guess is a short in the motherboard or something like that - the newer Lenovos operate on a 90W power adapter and I have a feeling that they are pretty cramped in there, with more power running around than you would like.)
Well, for once the backup system worked, as did everything else. Knut Yrvin put up his laptop (running Linux, incidentally), I logged on to my account at Foldershare.com, and lo and behold, the presentation which I had saved just minutes earlier was there in all its glory. Downloaded it to Knut's' laptop, opened it (in OpenOffice 2.4), and it ran like a charm.
Backup and interoperabilty, folks. It's the new black.
I can't recommend Foldershare highly enough. A life-saver. It can sometimes be tricky to install on some corporate networks, but boy, what a tool. Get it. It is free from Microsoft and, to quote Jerry Pournelle, It Just Works. Get It Now.
Now I just have to hope that my hard disk can be salvaged - while I have backup of my documents and email, there are some files and programs that for various reasons (mostly sloth on my part) were not backed up. As for getting a new laptop, that may take a week or two, but since summer is coming and I am mostly working from home anyway, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Posted by Espen at 05:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
SIm card as platform
I am at the Open Nordic Conference in Skien (about two hours south-west of Oslo), listening to Lars Ingvald Hoff from Telenor R&D talking to a bunch of developers about the new, platform-like SIM cards coming out.
The new SIM card has plenty of memory "gigbytes", USB interface (means you can get data from the SIM card real fast), virtual machines (or at least virtual memory areas, closed off, called SSDs). Tele operator has control of the card, application developers can install SSDs (whatever they are) that run in a sandbox. One business model may be that operators will charge rent for space on the SIM. Seems like a pretty full architecture to me. Translation HMTL to APDU (command language for phone) in a web server on the card, so in principle you could move your cell phone onto the net. Alos has a "Java Card", where you can to some extent can have interoperable applications running between manufacturers. Secure and certified environment, not full Java stack , but a pretty good selection. Standards based, not operator-specific.
FC: New short-range communications protocol, can be used to access payment terminals and similar, secure devices.
Apps can be downloaded and installed via a variety of protocols (among them BIP (Bearer Independent Protocol) directly to the SIM card.
In other words, mobile phones are going to open up to a much larger extent. I predict that the SIM card over time will become you - an identification and payment device.
Future future SIM card - you will get IP stacks, threads, full Java virtual machine, will look more and more like a server.
Posted by Espen at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 19, 2008
Open Mobile conference musings
Tomorrow I am giving a talk on disruptive technologies at the Open Nordic Conference, and how that theory applies to open standards and open source in the mobile technology industry. The audience is apparently very technical and I, quite frankly, do not think that open source plays that much of a role - apart from providing available functionality for innovators (mostly at the user interface/user service level) to build on.
The challenge in mobile technology (and in any consumer technology whose aim is to facilitate interaction) lies in establishing a platform for users and business to build on. Right now I am listening to Nick Vitalari analyze platform establishment and growth as part of the nGenera project PBG: Building a platform for business growth.
I am thinking about how platforms get established - and playing with words. It seems to me that the process can be described in terms of four words:
- Problem (often personal): Somebody has an itch to scratch, something that can be fixed with software, so they do it. (This is what Eric Raymond considers to be the beginning of almost any open source project.)
- Product (or service): The solution to the problem gets productized, either in a closed or open fashion, using standard or collaborative programming and development processes.
- Platform: The solution expands both in scale (distribution) and scope (technologies it can run on, added services, links to other solutions) until it is less a solution in itself for others to build on, where customers and users get it less for itself than for the added functionality it provides.
- Protocol: The platform becomes so open and ubiquitous that it is available everywhere, fading into the background in terms of user awareness. This can happen in many ways - it can expand to become all-encompassing (Google, for instance, maybe Facebook in certain communities, email certainly); it can be modularized with tools that pulverizes the proprietary value proposition (emulation, multiple clients (like Trillian in the chat space, cross-licensing); it can be regulated into a standard (AT&T with telephones, for instance); or it can be subsumed into an underlying functional layer (Microsoft's embrace and extend strategy).
In the end, it will be forced into some form of openness.
Half-baked so far, but it's a start.
Posted by Espen at 06:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 13, 2008
Will the real security please stand up?
Peter Cochrane has it right - our preceptions of security and risk are way off. The single most dangerous thing I am doing today is probably driving my daughter to school. The most dangerous part of an airplane trip is driving to the airport. And the biggest security threat to your infrastructure is the employee who inadvertently posts your marketing plan on a world-readable wiki or stores his password on a Post-It note under the keyboard.
Michael Pollan says something of the same in In defense of food - that low-fat diets cause you to eat processed food and trans-fats, which are unhealthy. Instead, you should eat fresh, varied and pleasing food.
In other words, use common sense, taste buds, and simple mathematics.
Trouble is, that approach is hard to productize and market.....
Posted by Espen at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 11, 2008
Shared blindness
Ben Elton: Blind Faith, 2007
Ben Elton describes a society where reason is not allowed - where everything is based on faith and feeling, where everybody has to share what they are doing, where everything is ostensibly permitted, even encouraged, where everyone is famous. By law.
This world is a Web 2.0 version of 1984, nightmarish in its shallowness. Elton manages to make it both scary and believable - aside from the the inevitable screw-ups when it comes to technology (the hero creates some software that is decidedly primitive given real search-engines' capabilities for sentiment analysis and finding links between information items.
Recommended.
Posted by Espen at 03:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The last days of eBay
Interesting article in the London Review of Books by Thomas Jones. I always thought eBay's competitive advantage (aside from the obvious network effects) lay in its payment system (i.e., PayPal). But proprietary platforms will over time be out-competed by open and modular ones - about time selling something vent from platform to protocol.
Posted by Espen at 03:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
June 09, 2008
The importance of failure and the value of photographic evidence
J. K. Rowling does a great commencement speech at Harvard.
Posted by Espen at 01:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 03, 2008
retrogoogling
Here is goosh.org, a UNIX-like interface to Google. I like it - wonderful how a sparse interface can improve productivity. It is almost so I start to long back to the days of Desqview and all those other text-based multitasking hacks of the 90s. (Mind you, this is just an interface, no full Unix shell.)
(Via David Weinberger.)
Posted by Espen at 09:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 02, 2008
The Pigs Ate the Sausage
Tom Evslin quotes Andy Kessler on the explanation for why Bear Stearns collapsed: The Pigs Ate the Sausage.
Shows the usefulness of a lively (and entertaining) metaphor.
Posted by Espen at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 30, 2008
Mass Digitization: Time to fund it properly
The always readable Dan Cohen discusses funding for digitization of public domain books. Hard not to agree - I think Harvard-Yale-Princeton (or, for that matter, Harvard alone) should just pony up the money and do it. The resulting archive would be a boon to humanities research and researchers all over the world, would yield immense dividends in the form of research and study activity for decades, and would give Harvard a signal project like that courseware project down the river, especially given the recent kvetching about the size of the Harvard endowment and the lack of visible largesse on the expense side.
Posted by Espen at 06:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 29, 2008
Signatures by fax, and security in context
(this is a work in progress, thought I would write this in public and see what reactions I get)
Bruce Schneier, the world's leading authority on security, writes well about why we accept signatures by fax - noting that it works because it is done in context, everyone understands how insecure it is (except in the relatively rare instances when they don't.) One thing is that we tend to think of new technologies in terms of old technologies: The physical signature can easily be faked with a fax, even easier when we start to use scanned PDFs - in fact, gluing in a copied signature becomes the standard way of doing things for most people.
I am currently thinking about security in a next-generation employee computing setup, where corporate infrastructure has retreated behind a browser and the end user can buy whatever he or she desires - be it a Mac or PC, laptop or desktop, cell phone or public terminal. Every user comes in via the public Internet, even if he or she is physically sitting right next to the server park.
From a security standpoint, this is actually a simplification, much as you simplify PC provisioning when you switch everyone to a laptop. Sure, many of the users don't need a laptop, and a laptop is more expensive than a desktop. But differentiation has its costs, too. And it is much easier to make a desktop out of a laptop - in essence, all you need to do is sit still - than it is to to do it the other way.
If you move to an architecture with corporate infrastructure and personal, private terminals, you remove the inside-or-outside-the-moat distinction companies often naively use as their main security barrier. Instead you must verify everyone's identity in terms of the information and functionality they can have access to. You need to specify this as a very granular level, and will need a well defined hierarchy of access rules. You will also, like Wikipedia, need to have a way to track who has done what where, and make it easy to reverse whatever changes has been done, should it prove necessary.
I am less certain that you need much of a standard for what should run on the clients themselves - surely we have progressed to a point now (or will in the near future) where end users can take responsibility for keeping their own technology's reasonably updated and secure? We probably need to rethink security in terms of consequence management, in the sense that we need to make the consequences of poor security become apparent to the end user. The analogy is to car safety - for all the nagging about putting on your seatbelt and monitoring speeding, nothing would reduce deaths in traffic as much as a mandatory large spike sticking out of the steering wheel, instantly impaling the driver should he or she crash or suddenly brake.
(and that is as far as I got before the telephone started chiming, and it was time to scoot off for meetings and other things that eat up your day. I will be back. Comments, of course, are most welcome.)
Posted by Espen at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
