Ford’s New Community Site July 25, 2006
Posted by poseidon715 in Technology, business.comments closed
It looks like Ford is shooting for a better image through transparency with their new community site. The disclaimer at the bottom is, I think, telling and useful:
Any content and/or opinions expressed in this Web site, including without limitation, message boards, articles and responses to questions are solely the opinions and responsibility of the person or entity named as the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Ford Motor Company. You also understand and acknowledge that you are responsible for the content of any message that you post to this site.
Since Ford owns this site, the communication will probably be somewhat limited. But then again, maybe this isn’t so bad as it cuts down on flame wars and other possibly offensive content (offensive to whom?). While this could potentially be a best-case scenario for corporate sponsored community, one always feels a little skeptical about any communication platform whose primary service is always to the company’s bottom line.
The Truth About Dogs July 19, 2006
Posted by poseidon715 in books.comments closed
When we received The Truth About Dogs in the mail this weekend, all of my old prejudices about pet books immediately surfaced. I remember reading somewhere when I worked at a bookstore that the sale of pet books basically pays to keep the more serious literature on the shelves.
I don’t quite hold on to these prejudices as strongly as my “student revolutionary” persona once did. And that’s good, because if I did, I would have missed out on reading a pretty good book.
The author, Stephen Budiansky, takes an evolutionary approach to the dog, discussing evolutionary genetics liberally. In the second chapter, Proto-Dog, he traces the human-dog relationship back to prehistory. Budiansky paints a picture of a dog that figured out how to warm up to humans in order survive. In this view, the dog that allows itself to be domesticated is actually the evolutionary superior to the wolf who refuses to be tamed. Wolves, after all, are now close to extinction.
The book goes on to explain doggy behavior through an understanding of canine color-blindness, olfactory senses and other brain shaping physical traits, and the negative effects of anthropomorphism. The book ends with a discussion of current breeding habits encouraged by the likes of the American Kennel Club, in which he favors a healthy genetic distribution (i.e. mutts).
I’ll close with a sentence from his concluding remarks:
“The True Dog is that animal that evolved with us, adapted to and exploited our society, and that did so on terms largely dictated by himself.”
The Sentiment of Determinism July 18, 2006
Posted by poseidon715 in Philosophy, Theology.comments closed
Last week I had a great conversation with some friends about the old debate over free-will and determinism. Actually, it was framed as a theological debate between free-agency and predestination. Technical terms aside, these are just different ways of discussing the same fundamental issue.
So why is this a fundamental issue? Why does this question bother us so much? Since the days of Socrates (and probably before that) mandatory Introduction to Philosophy courses have generated many a rivalry over this issue (along with the resulting casualties who vowed to never take a philosophy course again!). Whole church denominations have formed solely as a response to this debate.
The debate itself seems impassable.
On the one hand, when one looks at the world from a macro perspective, there seems to be undeniable proof that all of our actions and the actions of the people around us have been determined from the very beginning of creation. The deterministic stance is argued from the grounds of Evolution, Historicism, Theistic Omniscience, etc. The evidence staggering.
And yet…
That is not what our experience tells us. When I have a decision to make, I have to make it and there are tangible consequences for whichever option I choose. So I deliberate. If it is a big decision I mull it over for days, even weeks. And at the end of that period, my genes, environment, divine election, etc tell me it was inevitable that I would make that choice. But for me, this idea of determinism holds no practical value. If determinism had something of substance, something real to offer, it would have helped me make my decision. As it is, deterministic theories are just so many words – nonsensical. The epitomy of why college freshmen dread Philosophy 101.
So what do we do? From a practical perspective, perhaps we should just throw this out with every other pointless philosophical banter. But however we try to quell it, the debate keeps rearing it’s head.
***
It seems to me that this question has several psychological implications that make it difficult for us to come to terms with. On the one hand, determinism is what provides our stability. It’s what gives us methodology and allows science to happen. It allows me to know that when I set my alarm at night, it will go off just as I set it (assuming no power outage like last night!) and the sun will be in the sky just as it was yesterday morning and every morning before that. Determinism coupled with divine foreknowledge of a good God, provides the blessed assurance that this world, though troubling to us from our limited perspective, is all under control. This is great comfort to me on days when I need rest. Relaxing in divine providence and finding a zen state of peaceful consciousness is a required solace at times from the everydayness of life.
But then if I stay in this state too long, I begin feeling trapped, suffacated. Am I not my own man, with my own intentions, separate from what culture and whatever cosmic forces are at work? I want to break out with the kind of radical existential freedom particular to 20th century French activists. But it is not just a selfish sentiment. Saddened, ennobled, then enraged by the injustices around me, I feel the need to stand up to the social herdsman
and change the course of history, in company with so many revolutionaries that have gone before. As James Joyce wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
***
The point I hope to make is that there are underlying, pre-scientific, pre-logical, (pre-conscious?), conditions that often color our thinking, and this is often evidenced by the questions we value. Is there an answer to this question? Probably. Can we ever know the answer? I’m doubtful, particularly due to the all of the “pre-” conditions that are involved. Of course, there is always the strong possibility that we are asking the wrong question.
Paradigm and Innovation July 15, 2006
Posted by poseidon715 in SOA, Technology, Thomas Kuhn.comments closed
Innovation drives business technology. Innovation gives us the upper hand on our competitors. Innovation excites us. And rightfully so. The technologist enters a career in computing to solve new problems, create cool new gadgets, and find new uses for established methods.
Much literature has been written on the process of innovation, and I do not wish to repeat what others have said more eloquently than I could on that topic. I would like to briefly discuss another subject that is intimately related to innovation: paradigms.
A paradigm, simply put, is a way of understanding and framing the technical problems with which we are faced. According to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms define:
· what is to be observed and scrutinized,
· the kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject,
· how these questions are to be structured,
· how the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm, May 8, 2006)
While Kuhn’s focus is on the nature of scientific inquiry, his observations have a broader application for many creative pursuits, especially in the area of information technology. If paradigms frame our understanding of technical problems, and shape our solutions to them, it stands to reason that new paradigms are often a precursor to innovation. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines innovation as:
1: the introduction of something new
2: a new idea, method, or device: novelty
Innovation occurs when we look at a familiar product and find a new application for it. Most innovation occurs after a paradigm shift has taken place within the inventor. A paradigm shift occurs when an individual’s approach to her technical puzzles switches from one paradigm to another, from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics for example. It is at this time when the mind is most fertile for innovative thought, as the individual looks at her present problems with “new eyes”.
Let’s illustrate this point with a useful example: Service Orientation. Service Orientation is a higher-level abstraction for what manifests itself as the Service Oriented Architecture model of distributed computing and the “Software as a Service” model in software product design. I would argue that Service Orientation is not an example of innovation, but Service Orientation is a paradigm from which innovation can develop.
Let me repeat: Service Orientation is not innovation. Service orientation, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), is a paradigm, a way of looking at a problem, which allows innovation to take place.
Paradigms are developed through a combination of theory, experimentation, and tools. The services theory is heavily based in object-oriented design. In fact, often the first reaction I get when explaining SOA is that it is just a fancy way of talking about client-server architectures and n-tiered design. But while the two concepts are similar, SOA is remarkably different. The basic theory is not new, and has existed in distributed computing architectures for decades. What qualifies SOA as a “new” paradigm is twofold. First, is the addition of a common tool, which acts as a lingua franca for distributed systems: xml. The second qualification is the general acceptance of these tools among practitioners in the computing field. In order to be affective, paradigms must contain a social component just as the literary epic contains a social component. While many writers have created tomes of poetry with epic themes, only the works of poets who gained a social acceptance (Homer, Dante, Milton) are considered “epics”. Paradigms require the same social component. As such, the community in the past 5-6 years has deemed SOA a legitimate, indeed essential, paradigm.
At this point there are two directions in which this discussion could go, each in the form of a question:
As Service Orientation, and SOA in particular, seem fairly low level, are there higher paradigms from which these are based?
I see this question has extremely important to both further clarifying and perfecting the current Services paradigm, and finding the next paradigm to take its place. Indeed, paradigms are nested, so to speak, and one’s approach to technical problems is complex, consisting of layers of perspective that act as the Prophet Ezekiel’s “wheels within wheels”. SOA is a lower level (almost code level) paradigm that has been created from such presuppositions as Network Ubiquity and Transparent Computing, which themselves make up higher level computing paradigms. I will leave this question open for discussion right now.
The second, more approachable question is this:
Why do we need to switch to a Services paradigm – what is the value over the old paradigm?
Let’s take the distributed computing paradigms of Client-Server and SOA for comparison as Client-Server is the most recent “way of doing things” before SOA, and they both live on the same paradigmatic nested level. It is not the intention of this discussion to get into technical specifics of how SOA is implemented, but rather I would like to briefly mention four technical problems that SOA the paradigm addresses:
- Integration
- Location Transparency
- Asset Reuse
- Stability
Let’s get down to brass tacks. All technical projects need funding, and there are solid business reasons for implementing SOA-based structures within the enterprise. I would like to propose four business benefits (Return On Investment scenarios) for SOA that map to the above technical solutions:
- Lower Integration Costs
- Faster Time To Market
- Increases Business Agility
- Reduces Risk Exposure/ Increased Compliance
Now this discussion needs to come full circle and discuss how this all relates to innovation. I think the best thing I can do at this point without drilling down into specifics is to offer a few examples of innovation that has taken place within the Services paradigm in the past few years.
*ML Languages
Web Services and REST
Google as a Service
Microsoft Office as a Subscription Service
All of these bullet-points could be broken out further and several more pages could be written, but right now I just want to open this up for discussion and see if you agree with the basic premise.
Is there a paradigm/innovation dichotomy?
Is SOA a good fit in this discussion?
What are the bigger paradigms in which SOA is nested?
Are there other opportunities and risks associated with SOA that I have overlooked?
What are other examples of innovation within the SOA framework?
Situated Software July 15, 2006
Posted by poseidon715 in Technology.comments closed
Here is a great article from Clay Shirky on what he calls situated software. What I found most interesting about this article is the focus he brings to the implicit social contexts that determine the use and success of software.
Thanks for stopping by. I hope I can make this interesting… July 14, 2006
Posted by poseidon715 in Uncategorized.comments closed
First of all, my day job is Systems Architecture, specifically in the area of e-commerce. As such, I do a lot of thinking and writing about technology and the Web. Secondly, I do a lot of reading, thinking and writing about philosophy and theology. While these areas of interest may seem at times wildly disparate, I think there is a “golden strand” that ties them all together – on a good day, at any rate.I will be experimenting with different ways to separate and integrate this material where appropriate for my friends who lean toward one area or another. And I hope I can make the material interesting along the way. So this is a work in progress, and probably more work than progress in the beginning.
