I found a link to an interesting-looking book over there: Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly. The book is available in full online.
Out of Control is a summary of what we know about self-sustaining systems, both living ones such as a tropical wetland, or an artificial one, such as a computer simulation of our planet. [...] The major themes of the book are:
As we make our machines and institutions more complex, we have to make them more biological in order to manage them.
The most potent force in technology will be artificial evolution. We are already evolving software and drugs instead of engineering them.
Check out the table of contents for the book. Speaking of biological mechanisms, ever notice how biological systems have a tendency to fail gracefully? And to recover impressively well from disruptive events they were not designed to handle?
Al Macintyre's Radio Doc Sources.. A great collection of links to Radio documentation, tips, tools, experts. I keep finding new, juicy things and ripe, proven resources. High editorial value. Thanks, Al. [a klog apart]
I like the way Al makes the identity of authors stand out. It helps you get a feeling for who knows what.
Thisishow a typicalresume looks like. My opinion is that it's impossible to tell anything from a typical resume. [...] Blog your resume. It's a win-win situation. Potential employer has a much better chance to assess your skills and experience. You'll have a better chance to showcase your skills and you'll have an edge over resumes that only say "Programming skills: C/C++, PHP". Of course you should start now, the day you're out of work is probably a few years late. [...] [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] What do you think? [] links to this post 5:18:06 PM
Cool. Caltech course notes and homework assignments for a course on Quantum Computing. You gotta love the way Caltech and MIT are putting course notes online (althought MIT hasn't launched yet from what I have seen). Does anyone have any links to advanced courses in the Humanities that are online? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Preskill's notes are pretty well-written. At our lab we spent a summer discussing a chapter a week, professors and students together. I'm sure there's a lot of Humanities material online, but how to find it is the problem.
Jim Morrison's interview with Peter Suber on the FOS movement is now online in the September-October issue of The Technology Source. [FOS News]
Quotes:
The day is not far off when most scholarly authors and readers will expect open access as a matter of course. Journals that don't provide it may survive, but they will be resented by authors for limiting their audience and by readers for limiting their access.
I also expect that software to help readers find relevant literature will become more and more sophisticated over time, roughly matching the advances in artificial intelligence. Readers frustrated by information overload will come to rely on these sophisticated tools. Works of scholarship invisible to these new-generation searching, recommendation, and evaluation tools will be invisible to researchers.
I believe that intelligent filtering will be offered not only by sophisticated software but also (if not mostly) by humans who act as guides, offering timely, well-informed, open reviews just as Stephen does in the field of online learning, for example. Obviously they are more likely to discuss content that is available on the Net. What's not online will be marginalized.
Ductile. When someone jumps the fence at an airport terminal, the whole airport has to be shut down, all the passengers deplaned, and everybody re-searched. The delay it causes can last for hours, but it's necessary because there aren't any barriers between each terminal and the fence-jumper could have conceivably passed a weapon off to someone who'd already gone through the metal detector and pat-down. In other words, a moment after a fence-jumper gets through, a passenger carrying a weapon could be anywhere.
In security jargon, this would be called a brittle system, because a single failure is catastrophic: when it fails, it fails badly. The opposite would be a system that's ductile, where a failure can be contained and not allow its effects to spread to the rest of the system. If you walled off the terminals so passengers can't freely move between them, then a single fence-jumper can't force the entire airport to shut down. What ductile means is not that a system is fail proof, just that it fails well.
[...]
The philosophy of putting human beings into the loop, gifted with the power to make decisions, has a tradition that goes all the way back to the United States Constitution—one of the longest lasting designs for a ductile system in history. Inevitably these systems also make sure those humans are held accountable, and may in turn be overridden, such as with checks-and-balances.
“Failure happens”, the idea is not to let any single failure kill you. [Disenchanted Dictionary]
Marc Demarest writes an often amusing, but always thoughtful, article on intranets as data junkyards. He draws parallels to city planning, and uses this to highlight common problems with corporate intranets. [...] What is really interesting, is that this article was published in 1997. What has changed in the last five years? Nothing.[Thanks to the Guide to Ease weblog.] [Column Two]
The wider Internet is also a City of Text. Personal weblogs and wikis are its living knowledge homes. Collective weblogs and community wikis are its parks and agoras, the next higher lifeform. The overall architecture is still immature, but quickly evolving. Everybody's learning fast, borrowing innovative patterns from their neighbors and incorporating them in their own designs. Christopher Alexander's work is more relevant than ever, as people are more and more empowered to shape their little corner of cyberspace.
Speaking of neighbors, it has occurred to me that the Web is actually the only place where everyone gets to hand-pick every single one of their neighbors. I find it fantastic.
Eduardo Saguier's open letter on academic censorship and the dearth of open access [in developing countries] has now been posted to a forum at Dr. Dobb's Journal, where it is gathering some replies. Quoting Saguier:"This letter is submitted with the purpose of promoting debate as to what extent the practice of scientific research should or should not be regarded as a fundamental civil and human right, to what degree electronic information for academic study should be subject to democratic deliberation and scientific priorities rather than to market forces and business profits...." [FOS News] What do you think? [] links to this post 2:20:31 PM
A History of Playing Cards. If I had to choose one game-like thing for my stay on the proverbial desert island, it'd have to be a deck of cards. No one game has generated more variations or shown more extended play value. And here's its history from the International Playing Card Society. [DeepFUN Weblog]
Some readers may be interested in knowing that Nintendo actually started out in 1889, selling "Hanafuda," Japanese playing cards in Kyoto.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but at some point I became an extreme anti-extremist. Or maybe the way to say it is that I became hyper-empathic: I couldn't avoid seeing issues from every point of view.
And he doesn't just see that way, he makes us see that way too.
The idea for the talk is that Computer Scientists (like me) often view "IT" as that icky stuff that business people do. The truth is that its a $1.5T (yes, trillion) enterprise globally and that it CS doesn't pay attention, they're going to find themselves marginalized.
Here are a couple quotes:
Computer Science, which gave birth to the information technology revolution, is no longer the driving force in the field.... As IT innovation soars, most comes from non-academic sources and most academics find themselves surprised at their lack of foreknowledge.
It's nice to hear the point of view of someone who's been on both Sides of the Ivory Divide.
