An odd day to pick apples

We went apple picking today. Didn't drive today because I felt a bit tired- so looked out the window instead, when I didn't doze off briefly.

In the dining room at Indian Ladder Farms, my son, age 7, declined his potato chips- on the grounds that "they make potato chips to trick you into thinking you're still not hungry to make you eat more- and they're not good for you!"
Likewise with the french fries I offered him from my plate.

Not long after, when we were next to the car eating the cider donuts (allegedly fried in *gasp* lard) he sat reading his book, completely disinterested, while my wife, daughter and I ate a donut or two each. He did go for the apples though while picking them. A toddler, about 18 months I think- took interest in me and my son. Shortly afterward, when my son had to go to the porta-potty, I noticed the same toddler charge out of the trees towards the parking lot. I intercepted him- he was laughing and holding my hand- and I noticed his family was nowhere in sight. I tried to call a worker, and another parent stopped by to help- so I called my daughter over the radios we carried into the orchard- who in turn found the Mom of the adventurous toddler. A couple minutes later, toddler and (frightened out of her friggin' mind) Mom were reunited. Not everyday you lose your toddler in a busy, crowded orchard. I hope.

It's raining, past midnight, everyone' asleep, SNL sucks, and I'm taking a break in trying to figure out what I'm writing about task management and a task processing language.

And I'm struck with a very odd thought: what if the economy didn't collapse because of sub-prime mortgages-- what if it collapsed because the economy got too complex? What if societies collapse when they're overwhelmed with complexity? I had a bunch of ideas about information processing and complexity- but it reads a bit odd.

I'm thinking this: what if economic growth is just based on continually increasing the "information density" of business transactions? And if- again- growth is exponential, while our ability to process those transactions *fully* is linear?

Then, I'm guessing, the smarter companies develop more sophisticated products, with more sophisticated features, and we have to play by harder rules- how to keep the stuff working, how to avoid penalties and late payment fees, etc. Eventually, we start making more mistakes, because things have gotten more complicated, and our ability to processes higher densities of information have grown- at best- linearly.
As the complexity grows, the gap between information density, transaction volume and information processing capability grows, creating an information processing deficit. (Even if the number of transactions grows linearly, and the density grows linearly, the product of the two is exponential growth.) When this information deficit accumulates, the ability to process new transactions begins to
slow, creating a greater backlog of information tasks to be processed.

If you consider that information is based on the context of workers, relationships, and tools, then the only alternative to processing faster is to outright dispense with the backlog- eliminate the people, resulting in the destruction of unprocessed information via layoffs. Then organizations can restructure- simplify- and after an initial recovery cycle where information processing is restored, they resume the cycle.

Off to bed now. Tomorrow is a day to figure out what to do with a basket of apples.

Gettin' my first conference on

My funding requests for the ASIS&T conference I'm presenting at in November are finally submitted. I swear I spent more time applying for the cash to pay for the trip than I did writing the paper in the first place. It's Vancouver, though I'm not sure I'll notice much of the city.

Apparently, getting a conference paper accepted doesn't count until you show up, plunk down a few hundred for the cover charge, and actually present it to the people who will someday be my peers. Well, you can't spell "conference paper" without "conference". I've been advised (by one of my advisers no less) that a conference paper would wisely be the basis of a journal article in the same publication or better, and would still count as two publication credits, so long as it's at least 50% new material. ("New and improved with 100% more research!")

Academia.

I went to Portland OR about 3 years ago for an Open Source conference, though as just an attendee on my own dime. Among other things, I had a chat with Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented Wiki. I immediately fell in love with Portland, and the idea of the Northwest in general. I'm betting the same will be even more true for Vancouver, where one of the inventors of XML and RDF will be a keynote speaker.

Six weeks before my plane takes off. I've already bought a 1 oz travel squeeze bottle to carry my hair gel, and a travel tooth brush. You'd think I'd never been on a plane before, not someone who used to fly to Chicago twice a month in the late 90's and logged 8 trips to Japan when I treated trips to Newark International like going to Ikea. :)

Social Software reflections

In thinking about Dave Winer's side project of open-sourcing the URL shortening service tr.im, I'm struck with a thought.
What creates an "online society"? If an aggregate of social interactions is a society, operating on some mutually-enforced constraints, can the same be said of "virtual society"? We come and go from the virtual one at will, so the boundaries are considerably more difficult to enforce externally. Perhaps we bring our internal boundaries to the online world, tentatively venturing out as we see fit.
Is a URL Shortener like Tr.im or TinyURL.com big enough to constitute a community? I think so- though a tech-enabled community, only so much as its use passes useful information forward, to each successive user. The more users of a service, the more value-added information can be passed to later sessions. The value of an online community might be a function of the net contribution of each user and the additional value added by reprocessing user-contributed data.
On one side is Wiki and Blogs, where the user types content, and the service manages links between pages. They're literally mid-1990's technologies. URL shortening services return short links for the users who contribute long ones. However, the services inherently monitor the volume of traffic to selected sites, and potentially can aggregate the data. Facebook AFAIK (I don't- and won't- sign up for a lot of reasons) manages link data between people and affiliations, in addition to managing user content. I haven't heard to what extent it reprocesses it- or adds value to it- any more than say Wikipedia does.

So the state of social software is what- a "million monkeys typing" on one side, and heavily reprocessed web traffic on the other- and on both sides, just simple data models I teach in my 101 class. Here, social software for all its talk about "tag clouds" is nowhere near at best, and running away from at worst, the goals of "semantic web" we talked about at the start of this decade, before Social Software really moved to the forefront.

It's time to return to Semantic Web, and social software can either step up the game, or fall by the wayside for the enormously wasteful time-suck it has become. Social software is a giant leap backwards for computing and it's time to get back on the track we started with XML technologies in 1999-2003 before the web was co opted by sites like MySpace.

Will sell out for free coffee

Found this today.
For every 10,000 who click through, I get another free Dunkaccino! Yay!

September 11th, 8 years later

I posted a brief note in 2003. The NYTimes had a well-crafted essay about the "future that many feared." Not much else to say about it, other than to say that life did go on, back to a normalcy that was difficult to imagine for the first year afterward, though inevitably in hindsight.

For having worked there, it took me over a year to have the guts to go back to the area, despite that I could have had a full access pass for the asking- what happens when you work construction with the site owner. I had no legitimate reason to be there, and just being another gawker seemed not merely inappropriate, but outright ghoulish since they were still recovering human remains the first year--I still thought of the site partly as a graveyard.

The unfortunate linkage made between 9/11 and Iraq lead to a rush to a war we're nowhere near exiting, 6 years later. And an ongoing mire in Afghanistan we're still stuck in despite early apparent success- ever closer to reliving the Soviet experience there just as some early commentators predicted in Iraq as well.

Last summer's run-up in energy prices was followed by the market crash. The realization that we need to seek energy independence while we retool domestic industry hasn't yielded much of substance yet. "Cash for Clunkers" so far cleared the car lots a little, but now that the Great Recession is officially over (after all, the bankers inexplicably have kept their jobs) the crisis seems to have passed though job losses and asset price drops continue.

There are a lot of ways to remember what happened. But rather than merely recoiling in remembering the anguish of that day, 8 years ago, something positive needs to finally emerge from that experience. We need to finally pick ourselves up and make ourselves stronger for the experience. Not merely by spending our national wealth in military deployments, but by investing in our collective future.

We lost a formidable symbol of national wealth. But only a nation of strength can rebuild a symbol of strength. To fixate on its reconstruction without moving forward is to build a false facade. I want to live in a country that rose up to solve our underlying problems and said, "by the way, we replaced the buildings with something even better."

It started

New semester. New students. New Blackboard annoyances.

It's Fall 2009. Year #6 of the PhD program, semester #9 as an instructor. I've almost lost count of the number of classes I've taught (42), though I'm now able to nod and suppress any external signs of amusement when other PhD's describe their four or five classes taught over their PhD career to date as "a LOT". I taught 10 (TEN) classes last spring. Some of them better than others. I will never do that again. I do have a dissertation after all, and finishing is more important than the extra adjunct pay, now that the pending economic apocalypse seems to have passed.

This semester, I have a "normal" course load of six classes, though really the same two classes taught a total of 6 times. It's like my old comment when asking about experience to prospective hires- do you have five years of experience, or a years' experience five times? A world of difference, it turns out, though the reverse of teaching the same course multiple times.

I've got two courses I've taught 15 times each, and another course I've taught 7 times. I like to think they get better over time, or at least the Wiki I build for each one gets just a little more elaborate. Fine wines gets better with age-
Table wine does not.

I've decided to stop teaching outside my home school, and left those classes for others to continue. I've liked the variety of experiences and students, but no longer feel it appropriate. Like footprints in the ocean, one adjunct's mark on a school ends as soon as final grades are submitted. But as faculty somewhere, one's mark isn't just the lectures and grades, but in policy, advisement, writing recommendations, strategic planning sessions, and other behind the scenes stuff that's invisible to the outside world.

But time to bed now, with the last of the setups completed for the first week back, with the summer behind me. I have mixed feelings about leaving a summer gig I worked at, doing database development from an office like I used to before moving to Albany five years ago. Nice to work on difficult problems with limited interruptions, like I did for almost 10 years split between NJ and NYC. But working even for a few weeks in the field is useful- arguably mandatory- to keep in touch with the workplace where we're sending our students. I for one am a firm believer that a key goal of education is preparing students for the workplace as well as modern society.