December 2006 Archives
Back from vacation on Kauai, and starting to dig out from the mass of email messages (50 gazillion messages, of which 25 are important - but how to find those except by looking at all of them?).
In the meantime, an update on the Home Music Project.
Over Thanksgiving weekend I finished encoding all of the CDs that were in my CD cabinet, and those are now ensconced in boxes in the garage. There's still a few CDs lingering around - several in both cars, a pile on my desk at work - but that's by far the bulk of the CDs.
So far the total is 12,075 songs, from 965 albums, taking up 74.09 Gigabytes of disk space.
I'm thinking that at some point it might make sense to use a big iPod as both as an additional backup and as a portable version of the whole library. It would all barely fit on the current 80 Gb iPod, but that doesn't leave much room for growth. I wonder if we'll see a 100 Gb iPod unveiled at MacWorld next month?
For those who care about the details, I encoded in mp3 format, variable bit rate, with 192 Kbps minimum sample rate. I know there are some who will say that I should have encoded in a lossless format at a high bit rate, but mp3 is by far the most portable format, and the sound quality is good enough for my fifty-three-year-old rock-and-roll-veteran ears.
I created an iTunes playlist for each album - it's a pleasure to scroll through the albums and set them playing. For Thanksgiving day, when we had a house full of people most of the day, I created a long playlist of a bunch of mellow party music and just let it play unattended - that was great!
I grabbed what cover art iTunes could find, but it only finds cover art for albums that are being sold on the iTunes Store, which leaves out a lot of my music (starting, but by no means limited to, the entire Beatles catalog). I'm thinking I should write a mashup that would figure out which albums don't have cover art and go grab the covers from Amazon. So far, however, I haven't figured out how iTunes 7 keeps track of cover art - there doesn't seem to be an entry that represents cover art in the iTunes Music Library.xml file.
The Mac Mini came with a remote and Front Row software, which I thought I'd use a lot, but so far we seem to just wander over to the computer and use the keyboard and mouse to pick direct from iTunes.
Here's a picture of the setup - you'll notice I haven't yet removed the 6-disk CD player, though I will soon. The cabinet is now resuming its former purpose of storing table linens, candlesticks, and the like.
Technorati Tags: music
Second Life has had an amazing amount of press coverage lately, with the mainstream press proclaiming the immersive environment the greatest thing since sliced bread - like this article in the Globe and Mail, for instance, calling Second Life a Signpost For the Future.
There are a couple of good responses to the hype from a couple of the most insightful and knowledgeable commentators on social technology, Clay Shirky and danah boyd.
Clay points out that lots of people are trying Second Life, but it's likely that not many are yet spending lots of time in the environment, or even becoming regular users.
He then goes on to note that we've seen all this before, in the hype a dozen or so years ago about MUDs and MOOs, and rightly points out that If, in 1993, you’d studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you’d have a better grasp of online community today than if you’d spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City. Ou sont les TinyMUCKs d’antan?
danah comments on Clay's post, correctly noting that the most successful social software environments, like MySpace, are being used as complements to the physical social world, not as virtual replacements for it, and that people don't want to socialize with lots of people they don't know from some other context.
If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.
I think Second Life is cool, but I think these well thought out perspectives from Clay and danah are spot on.
Technorati Tags: second-life, social-software
We're off on vacation for eleven wonderful days, this year to the island of Kauai.
No blogging, no working, just relaxing and having fun as a family!
A happy holidays to all of you out there in blogland.
Technorati Tags: vacation
Chris Meyer is CEO of Monitor Networks, who "Connect challenging problems with talented thinkers".
His latest book is titled ""It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business"
Chris started off by noting that networks(and he means human networks as well as the technologies that enable them) make markets better, and institutions haven't generally taken advantage of that. Examples of networks at work to make markets better include the success of Linux development, or the prize that Netflix is offering for anyone who can improve the success of the algorithm they use to predict related films people will like.
In the 21st century work is about how to be a node in a talent network.
Drivers of economic change include science, technology, business, and organization, which happen in that order. What's the organizational model in a world of information-intensive business?
The industrial model of business led to big institutions, but that's not an inevitable model in the information age. The current methods of strategic planning grew out of this industrial business model - the smart people at the top of an organization figure out what to do, create plans, and then implement them. The model of strategic planning assumes yo can lay out a strategy, then figure out a structure to go with it, then change systems and culture around that structure. The problem is that strategy and structure can change far more rapidly than systems and norms.
"Culture will defeat strategy every time" - Carl-Henric Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson
So how can organizations create adaptive culture?
Memes - How management evolves - replicating units of culture.
Talent - bringing a new meme pool into an organization when you hire.
meme #1 - Power is shifting to individuals.
In an information economy the scarce resource is intellectual capital. Call for a fundamental change in the relationship between individuals and institutions.
"Talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people."
Highly diverse and playful teams of talented people working on exploratory problems.
Networks - 3 intersecting frontiers: Technology, Science (networks and the science of human connectedness), and behavior.
"Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age" (Duncan J. Watts) - small world networks have a certain amount of randomness in the connections between people.
Clustering among people in organizations is not random, so meme diversity is low.
Network economics and the 80-20 rule vs. the long tail.
Sales in the long tail are very profitable and change the dynamics of markets.
The producer world - The Invisible handshake.
open sources as a business model
"Our civil war is digital rights management"
Book - "Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy" (Ron Goldman, Richard P. Gabriel)
meme + meme = a networked market for expertise, e.g. InnoCentive, a marketplace where seeker companies find problem solvers.
"No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else" - Bill Joy.
Worknets - emerging principles
Start with the work, not the network
1. Define your work
- networks are great at ascanning
- innovating
- convene - networks can bring diverse thinkers together.
- allocate
- influence
2. Talent
- content: segments, roles, talent
3. Exchange
- economic, informational, emotional aspects of value
- what's in it for the participants?
4. Experience of being in the network
- design the experience - what does it feel like?
THEN you can think about
5. The technology, virtual and physical.
Creating the experience around your brand.
He asked Josh Epstein - agent-based modeling expert, what's good about universities: "Leaving aside tenure and money, it is connectedness, access to the other best thinkers. You cannot physically assemble them all in one place, but you can guarantee that they're in your network."
How will universities adapt?
We have some abiliity to decrease the cost of increasing the flux - nodal vs. institutional - the university as worknet.
* think about how you increase the diversity of the meme pools you're in.
Put a rookie in the starting lineup every year - Branch Rickey - what would happen if you did turn over 12% of your management team each year, or 12% of your systems?
I'm at the Boulders Resort in the wonderfully named town of Carefree, Arizona, for the 2006 ECAR Symposium, where the topic is sustainability, broadly conceived.
Richard Katz kicks off the proceedings by announcing that ECAR now has 430 member institutions, which is much higher than they ever imagined.
Sustainability has become an issue that many are concerned about.
Sustain in music - a sound that lasts without appreciable decay.
Technorati Tags: ecar2006
Michael Diamond is a Professor at USC in the Business School and Senior Partner in Academic Leadership Associates.
What is Crisis Management and Why it's important?
- it's not planning for one incident in isolation
- thinking about planning for a wide range of crises and especially their interactions.
How is a crisis different from an incident?
- it's often the interaction among crises and the interaction between human behavior and some particular event or incident
- It is often the ability of the team to anticipate these interactions and prepare for them.
Human Factors vs. Natural Disasters
- From a time perspective, the factors / potential for human-caused crises are in place BEFORE the natural disasters.
One way to look at things is whether they're predictable and/or preventable.
The outrage over Katrina was mostly about the preventable and predictable human factors, not the natural disaster.
Crisis Management in the Current Environment
- A world of instant communications - youtube, the blogoshpere, cable TV.
- Leads to a world of instant anlysis, demand for instant answers, and the blame game and drudging up o fold incidents.
- this leads to the quick loss of control of almost any crisis.
- no crisis ever consists of a single crisis, but most organizations rarely consider more than a few types in planning for crises and even fewer consider the interactsions - e.g. loss of research data at Tulane from Katrina.
A Crisis Mnaagement Framework
- Before: expose eaknesses and build capabilities
- During: enact capabilities
- After - learn and redesign
- Systematically think about the whole range of businesses you're in - e.g. hotel and food services; retail stores; entertainment and events; property management; health care; insurance; conference business; IT business, etc.
- under crisis mechanisms is signal-detection - every crisis sends out a repeated trail of early-warning signal.
Potential crises / ticking time bombs - think about the things that can happen in each of the businesses.
Assessing the Current State of Crisis Management in Universities and Colleges
Change Magazine article, Jan/Feb 2006
Surveyed 117 institutions around the US. Found that colleges and universities are generally not prepared for crises, though they may be prepared for physical emergencies. When they are prepared, it's only for those things that they had experienced in the past. Most institutions do not have a broad-based management crisis team. Most did very little crisis management training, though they did train for emergency preparedness.
Recommendations for Effective Crisis Management
- Be prepared for a broad range of crises by developing a crisis portfolio
- Develop a list of ticking time bombs and understand what events could set them off.
- Develop a crisis map - e.g. what buildings does the most important research take place in? What are the most substandard buildings on campus? What's the relationship between the two maps? Where are there little kids on campus?
- Form a multidisciplinary crisis management team.
- Make sure that team is trained to handle a series of broad ranging and unanticipated crises, including reputational crises.
- Make sure the university has a clear chain of command.
- Make sure that adequate non-technology based communications are available.
- Find ways to increase support for crisis management as a leadership imperative.
- Systematically review and learn from the crises faced by other academic institutions.
Technorati Tags: ecar2006, crisis-management
Arthur Brooks is a Professor of Public Administration at Syracuse University.
In the United States people give about $260 billion per year to charity - 75% of American households give money each year. The average American family gives way more than in other countries - which is not due to changes in income or tax codes.
When you look at charitable giving as a percent of income, you find that the bottom quintile give far more of their income away to charity than the top quintile. Working poor families give more, both in time and money, than non-working poor families.
Robert Putnam survey - amazing link between giving and income. There are parts of charitable giving that push income. There is tangible evidence that a family that gives away $1 gets back $3.75 in income, on average. There is a "virtuous cycle of causation" between earning and giving, mutually reinforcing each other.
The evidence suggests that the United States gets a 19-1 earnings on the charitable dollar. This suggests that giving is a deeply patriotic act.
Research also finds that giving makes people happier and healthier, and builds stronger communities.
The bottom line of what the data tells us is that charity makes you happy, healthy, and rich.
Contrary to popular wisdom, the data suggest that large leadership gifts do not lead to multiple smaller gifts - that would suggest that if there's a part of the university that's receiving a lot of thousand-dollar gifts we shouldn't toss a $30 million gift in that pool.
Great quote:
"We want to release people from their resources, to their abundant benefit."
Technorati Tags: ecar2006
John Unsworth is Dean of the GraduatE School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. He's talking about the ACLS Report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Socieal Sciences.
Cyberinfrastructure is more than the technology, but it's the "intangible layer of expertise, best practices and standards, and it is tools, collections and collaborative environments that can be broadly shared across communities of inquiries."
When infrastructure works is should be invisible - and computers aren't invisible enough.
The Commission's report was just released on December 1. The topmost group of the intended audiences are "senior scholars, who have the power to change scholarly practice and the responsibility to exercise that power."
The long-tail phenomenon really does apply to even the most obscure subjects in the humanities.
Humanities research activities tend to unfold over decades, not months. Sustainability of projects is a huge concern.
Certain parts of the commercial sector are behaving far more adventurously with respect to intellectual property than universities are.
The report has eight recommendations that encourage the development of infrastructure for these sorts of efforts.
John Willinsky is Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy at the University of British Columbia.
The state of scholarly publishing and access to knowledge is his topic. The IT professional in universities has a new role that they need to act on. We need to move beyond something like sustainability - as a guitarist he notes that you have to work your fingers to keep the sustain, not just wait. Sustainability is just the status quo - but we know in our hearts that's not what this is about - we need to be very conscious of the values we want to sustain. And in access to knowledge the status quo is not working - we have degradation in that access.
Sustainability speaks to a business model - which in his business as an academic is the evil twin - what would Socrates have said when asked for a business model?
We need to identify those values that are at the core of what we do and sustain those, but we need to expand and extend what we do, not just sustain.
The good news is that this is a world of the knowledge economy - that is our ship coming in. That should have put the university at the very center of that economy - and anything that interferes with the university's production and aggregation of knowledge is a threat to that economy - but that didn't happen.
Google has changed the equation in terms of access to knowledge. Google has offered to digitize all back issues of journals, with the journals maintaining the copyright ownership and only showing ads when the journals ok it, and sharing the revenues with the journals when they do. Only one journal in Canada has taken them up on the offer.
The situation is one of corporate concentration. John Wiley just offered to purchase Blackwell. This creates a publishing house of 1200 journals. Reed-Elsevier, 2000 journals, etc. 6000 titles owned by four corporate entities. Libraries are having to buy in bundles of titles, having to sign non-disclosure agreements on the pricing. Only very few of those bundles allow you to cancel single titles.
The effect is on academic freedom - the ability to start, subscribe to, and stop new journals is at the heart of academic freedom. If we sustain a situation where it's difficult to start a new journal, we are interfering with academic freedom.
Fifteen percent of libraries are now canceling print editions and maintaining access to electronic versions. Publishers are either giving no reduction or less than 10 percent reduction in price for giving up print.
What does it mean when a journal goes corporate? 45% of journal titles are in corporate hands. When an association's journals go corporate, the price goes up. The scholarly societies don't see a choice - they need support for the electronic distribution of knowledge, and the publishers have very sophisticated mechanisms for that. Ted Bergstrom at UCSB has done work on comparing prices for non-profit vs. commercial journals. He has measured price per citation - in non-profit sector it's $15, in commercial it's $90. The commercialization is increasing cost, and unless budgets are rising that means a reduction in the access to knowledge. But this is in an era where the cost to disseminate knowledge is decreasing.
The alternative is the metaphor of openness. The metaphor is important because information technology can be used to restrict access as well as to increase dissemination. The principle is to increase access - anything that increases access to knowledge adds to the public good. The possibility of open data is exciting and a great example. In the humanities, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is open - struggling, but open.
Another aspect is the role of the amateur. In astronomy, if we're going to be hit by an asteroid, we won't be informed by a professional astronomer. The amateur astronomers are using the data available and are being included in a very substantive way in the field. The idea is that the university is part of a larger community. We reposition the university as a source of knowledge - we are dependent on the good will of the community and we can give back.
The wikipedia is like one long homework project that everyone is doing for no credit. How is it that people can come together to create this? We in universities need to participate in this. How do we connect the work we're doing in universities with things like the wikipedia? Through open access.
Publishers agree that authors have the right to put articles in institutional repositories or faculty web sites. Repositories are the first step - but how do we get people to fill them? Most faculty think publication is the end of the process. But it's to the advantage of the faculty, department, and institution to have the article in the repository - it will increase your citation rate. There are figures that suggest a 40% increase in readership from appearing in open access repositories.
Authors can buy open access to an article from the publisher for around $3,000. The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 will make it a mandate for every major agency to make articles available for free six months after publication. Organizations are mobilizing to support this.
The Public Knowledge Project started about eight years ago. What can IT professionals do to help scholarly societies? They built some open source software - an open journal system, an open conference system, and an open metadata harvester. The open journal system allows a group of scholars to manage and publish an online journal - imagines a library can set up a system to allow scholars to publish. These systems make the data available on the web in a form that is indexable and makes it findable by Google and others.
The library and the institution can offer scholars the opportunity to provide an alternative to commercial publication.
The major scholarly societies are running very sophisticated journal operations. He wants to suggest a publishing cooperative, of societies, libraries, and IT professionals. Bring in the libraries to apply knowledge and funding that could be saved from subscriptions. 600 scholarly societies use Blackwell to publish their journals - the scholarly societies have a release clause in the case of a sale - so what alternative do they have? The IT departments could help suggest the alternative.
Instead of sustaining the future, we want to envision a better future. We should be willing to create futures that increase access to knowledge.
Technorati Tags: ecar2006, open-access, science
This workshop was sponsored by NSF's Division of Science Resource Statistics, which collects data on the US science and engineering enterprise to be used for policy making purposes. They have collected data on the physical environment for research at higher education and biomedical institutions since 1986, and since 2003 they have begun to add a survey on cyberinfrastructure. The initial effort was to collect data on networking infrastructure, but now they are interested in also collecting data on high performance computing, storage, and large databases used for science and engineering research purposes. These surveys go to all research performing institutions with greater than $1 million in research expenditures and all biomedical institutions with greater than $1 million in NIH funding.
The workshop gathered a group of about fifteen participants from institutions as large as the UW, Penn State, and UNC, as rarified as Princeton, as specialized as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Scripps Biomedical Institute, and as small as the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, to brainstorm on what data points might possibly be collected on these activities that would be both meaningful and possible to collect.
Most of these institutions, unlike the UW, host some central research computing facility where a central IT organization runs some large high performance computing resources that are used by faculty doing research. But even in those institutions there are many other research computing efforts on the campuses that are not run by central organizations.
Over the couple of days what emerged was a way of classifying high performance systems into: Clusters (which can be either tightly or loosely coupled); Massively Parallel (MPP) machines with distributed memory; Symmetrically Multiprocessor (SMP) machines with shared memory; and Vector Processors (PVP) which it was noted aren't seen too much in the US.
Common data that can be collected about those kinds of compute resources includes: number of processors (there was an interesting discussion of how to count this in this day of multi-core chip-sets); processor speed; amount of memory per processor; what kinds of interconnects exist between processors; total RAM, total attached disk (and what kind); and total estimate of flops the machine is capable of.
Some interesting items pop up in my notes from the two days:
- The needs of a research data center are qualitatively different from the needs of a business data center in terms of types of facilities, access policies, and tolerance for what kinds of down time.
- Support for data management and use of databases is the fastest growing demand for help among researchers using high performance computing.
- UCLA has grown a strong grid computing initiative, which is not only supporting the other UC systems, but also providing cycles to the Cal State institutions and K-12 institutions in California, through the "Kids On The Grid" program.
- Princeton has evolved their academic technology support to a new group in OIT, their central IT organization, to support research computing. That group works very closely with PICSciE, the campus' new center for computational science and engineering work. The group within OIT concentrates on administering high performance systems that are widely used by researchers. They currently run an IBM Blue Gene, an SGI Altics, and a Beowulf cluster. They're building a 35 terabyte shared storage facility.
- One institution is building a brand new 11,000 square foot data center with 8 tons of cooling capacity - they figure that amount of capacity will only hold them for a year or two.
- The University of Houston has an interesting model where the system administrators for their research facility are not university employees but contracted from outsourced firms - they have a lot of folks in Houston with those skills providing outsourced services to the petroleum industry as well as academia.
- Purdue is running Condor clustering to make unused cycles from student computing labs available to research efforts.
It was a very interesting couple of days - it was great to meet folks I didn't know, and to get a feel for what's happening out there in this fast-changing field.
So I entered all my flight and meeting time information for this week into my Oracle Calendar. But of course those events are entered in the time zone where I entered the data. I synced my Nokia E62 calendar to my Oracle Calendar. When I arrived on the east coast, the phone changed to the current local time, and yep, you guessed it, it shifted all of my calendar entries by three hours.
Sheesh - you'd think devices meant for travelers would be smarter than this.
I know that this is something that OSAF's Chandler software gets this right - individual calendar entries can have timezones attached to them. Are there other software and devices that get this right?
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, chandler, e62, mobile-devices, nokia, OSAF
I'm traveling this week. First I'm in Arlington, VA, for a National Science Foundation workshop on high performance computing, storage, and large databases. NSF is starting to plan to survey research institutions on what's happening in those areas, so this workshop is going to center on discussions about what data will be useful (and/or possible) to collect. Should be a fascinating discussion.
For the second half of the week I'll be in Arizona for the annual Symposium from the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR). Richard Katz always puts together interesting and unexpected ideas for these meetings, which have been some of the most thought provoking of all of the gatherings I regularly attend. This year's agenda, which centers on the broad topic of sustainability, promises to be no different.
I'll post on both of these gatherings as I can during the week.
One of the things I really like about Firefox 2.0 is that if you have your preferences set to "New pages should be opened in: a new tab", when you click on a link in a web page, Firefox opens that link in a new tab. When you close that tab, Firefox takes you right back to the tab you opened the link from, instead of the nearest tab. For those of us who typically have dozens of tabs open, that's a real productivity enhancer.
I've been too busy lately to blog much, but I have been playing a bit with the ability to embed html views of Google calendars into web pages.
I keep a Google calendar of my travel and events, because it's much easier for me to see at a glance when I'll be out of town or unavailable that way rather than sifting through all the entries on my Oracle Calendar, which is cluttered with standing meetings, individual appointments, plane flights, and the like.
Google has now got a nice wizard called the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper that generates html for a view of a Google calendar that can be dropped into any web page, like so:
This month and January are particularly good examples, as I'm traveling a bunch. I've embedded this calendar into the sidebar of the blog, down below all the About Oren stuff.
The folks over at 30 boxes have built a nice calendar mashup engine called 30Boxed that lets you create calendar views from any icalendar feed. I tried that too, and I like the look and the fact that the month view scrolls a week at a time, but when I feed it my Google calendar ical feed it doesn't seem to realize that there are events I've deleted from my Google calendar. But there are some very cool mashups that can be made with this gadget, like timeline views of flickr photo sets.
Technorati Tags: 30boxes, Calendaring, google, mashups
