Monthly Archives: May 2005

Take a Number

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Martin suggests an interesting take a number design for how the presence, interrupt, asynchronies communication problem might be solved. For this to work well, an estimated wait time is needed. Different wait times for different correspondents based on static and dynamic information about the relationship. Monopoly telecommunication companies could let you spend multiple minutes from your monthly allotment to move thru the line faster. This is all tied to Martin’s insight that celebrities will sell elements of the presence to their fans. In the future we will all be celebrity phone companies!

Professional Grade Humor

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A friend of mine floated a cool idea regarding humor. We all know that humor comes in various species: irony, farce, slapstick, etc. etc. But we lack a scale of how skilled a bit of humor is. There is a world of difference between the appropriate bit of humor inserted into a cocktail party and the art of finding the humorous thing to say in the midst of a funeral.

Humor, like enthusiasm, is not self-moderating. A classroom of high school students can trivially be drawn into an escalating chain reaction. It’s ironic; teachers who labor to nurture wit find it necessary to quench even the slightest fission of humor because their charges are such ill-trained humorists.

Of course all emotions run the risk of running off into exaggerated forms. Stress, panic, depression, etc. etc. The wonder of humor is its ability to call them back down out of the stratosphere. It’s a high art of getting it just right. A skill we have all observed in talented people around us. Injecting just the right bit of wit into a situation, diffusing at least a portion of the escalating emotions.

If this talent had a name you could put on a job description! Awards could be granted: “Best pun used in an IRS audit.” High school councilors could advise students join the guild. An international society could be formed. States could grant and revoke licenses. Weighty text books and complimentary multi-media virtual world educational games could be sold at great cost to state school boards.

OpenID

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Interesting arrival at the identity party OpenID. It’s simple, so it might spread fast.

This is a design that works with the existing web infrastructure. No need to update the installed base of client software. Good, that’s a nearly immovable object.

The usage scenario is straight forward. A random anonymous visitor wanders into supicious site. Supicious site would like to know more about this visitor. It asks the user for the name of some site that can vouch for him. The user enters a domain name. The suspicious site fetches the home page of that domain. Secreted away in the header of the home page is information about where the suspicious site can go to have a conversation with the vouching site. Using that info the two sites can then work with the user to make everybody happy.

It’s a nice design because the user explicitly reveals the name of the vouching site he’d like to use.

The spec could use some careful security review. The design is currently silent on why the supicious site would trust the vouching site. The design lacks any tools for fine grain control over what’s revealed about the user, and the distribution of that info.

The usual scheme to bootstrap finding the vouching site is to use a shared cookie; this is a nice alternative. The server in your basement might be able to play the vouching role. That’s something geeks like in a design.

Giving it to the Customer

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Tim Bray’s posting on the Sun Microsoft interop demo is fascinating on many levels. It certainly adds to his reputation as an independent voice that while sympathetic to Sun’s goals is not entirely in the thrall of its message discipline.

He gives some validation to my hypothesis that the customer demand is one of the key drivers here when he writes “there’s no doubt that when the customers tell you to interoperate, then you bloody well interoperate.”

He makes the point I’d expect of a principle of institutionalized standardization to make “WS-Federation is yet another WS-backroom spec that might change (or go away) any time the people in the backroom want it to; not something I’d advise betting on.”

That the WS specs lack legitimacy from the perspective of a professional standards craftsman is absolutely true, and I suspect that customers were demanding that much more than they were asking to interoperate. An interop bridge is a poor substitute.

Getting a stamp of approval from a real standards body isn’t relevant if your solution wins in the marketplace. Microsoft’s installed base on both desktop and browser make that outcome entirely plausible.

Predicting how the market for enterprise identity management will standardize and how many vendors will get a portion of the market share remains a tough call. Both WS and Liberty are such complex specs that they aren’t well positioned to get rapid adoption. That is good for Microsoft and a problem for Liberty. Liberty is available in the market today, with implementations, real legitimacy from a credible standards body, a choice of vendors, and broad industry support. So that’s good for Liberty and a problem for Microsoft.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. Does the recent interop between Sun and Microsoft signal an end to the battle in this area, or does it just buy Microsoft some more time. It certainly does tend to let CIO/CTO decision makers defer deciding.

XXVIII. Cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted.

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David Chess reports that he has been listening to Supreme Court Justice Scalia. David suggests that rather than the “originalist” label that Scalia likes it is more accurate to call him a “temporal denotationalist.” Which is to say that the constitution denotes exactly what it denoted at the instant it was signed. He quotes this bit by Scalia:

I’m saying the Eighth Amendment means what was cruel and unusual and unconstitutional in 1791 remains that today. The death penalty wasn’t, and hence it isn’t, despite the fact that I sat with three colleagues that thought it had become unconstitutional. Executing someone under eighteen was not unconstitutional in 1791, so it is not unconstitutional today. Now, it may be very stupid. It may be a very bad idea, just as notching ears, which was a punishment in 1791, is a very bad idea.

Temporal denotation strikes me as being very stupid and a bad idea.

David then suggests we should pass the 28th amendment:

XXVIII. Cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted.

While to the untrained eye this would be a no-op it’s revolutionary to the eye of the “temporal denotationlist” since it resets the clock!

This could make for great political theater force the various state legislatures to vote to reratify the constitution! Welcome them into the 21 century. Look at the benefits: the industrial revolution, modern medicine, the electron, the novel, science, … golly!

Marketing the Vineyard Church

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Thru direct mail and radio advertising (on my local NPR station) a church here in town has been campaigning to make me curious about them. I’m a very secular fellow. But I happens to know a lot about abusive cults and so my first question was is this one of those large abusive cult churchs that spring up from time to time. Like, for example, the Boston Church of Christ.

The Internet can be a big help with questions like that. The large older abusive churchs are easy to identify because some of their survivors will post descriptions on the net. Vineyard probably isn’t one of those. But it sure has attracted a lot of analysis and commentary from folks who are interested in mapping out various church theological positions and those who are working to understand the evolution of American Protestantism. Much of that is pretty stern stuff.

For example “Vineyard emphasizes public healing, glossolalia (speaking in tongues), demon depossession, and prophecy.” and the following passage from here.

One obstacle the Vineyard Movement has recently faced deals with the disfellowship of the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church (also known as Toronto Blessing ). Over 300,000 people have visited the Toronto branch to experience for themselves the outbreak of “holy laughter.” Holy laughter is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit through hysterical, uncontrollable laughter. John Wimber and the Association of Vineyard Churches recognize holy laughter as an important part of their ministry. However, when the Toronto Vineyard started incorporating animal noises as part of the holy laughter experience, Wimber decided that they had gone too far. In 1994, the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church was kicked out of the Vineyard Movement. It was a difficult decision for Wimber to make considering the popularity of this charismatic event and due to the fact that the Vineyard Movement was in such a relatively early stage of development.

Wimber, along with C. Peter Wagner, was one of the founders to what is sometimes called the third wave. These three waves are Pentacostals (1902), the Charasmatics (1960s), and what is sometimes now called the New Aposstolic Reformation(1990s). These guys had a product to sell, a course on how to make your church grow faster. The key advise was to include more “Signs and Wonders” e.g. the glossolalia, demon depossession, and such. Wimber’s innovation was to add a lot of music. He had at one time been a keyboardest for the Rightous brothers.

So one thread here is the charasmatic or evangelical church growth movement. For example the Alpha program who’s signage you see hanging outside lots of churches is a direct decendent of the work of these two guys. The ads on NPR and the direct mailings reflect the increasing sophistication of modern marketing techniques in use by church growth experts such as these.

It isn’t clear to me exactly how much Wagner is still tied into the Vineyard moement. I wish I knew because I find him to be a scary character. He’s very, ah, pragmatic:

“… we ought to see clearly that the end DOES justify the means. What else possible could justify the means? If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method. If, on the other hand, my method is not accomplishing the goal, how can I be justified in continuing to use it?” (C. Peter Wagner, “Your Church Can Grow – Seven Vital Signs Of A Healthy Church”, 1976, pg. 137. – emphasis in original)

He’s really concerned about demons:

Peter Wagner in a symposium on power evangelism at Fuller Seminary affirmed: “Satan delegates high-ranking members of the hierarchy of evil spirits to control nations, regions, cities, tribes, people groups, neighborhoods and other significant social networks of human beings throughout the world. Their major assignment is to prevent God from being glorified in their territory, which they do through directing the activity of lower-ranking demons.” (John D. Robb, “Strategic Praying for Frontier Missions,” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, Study Guide, 1997 Edition, Pasadena: William Carey Library,1997), p.1-8.)

You might think this is kind of odd and marginal until you recall
General Jerry Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the following story:

Of a strange, dark mark on a photograph he took of Mogadishu, Somalia, during the Black Hawk Down operation of which he was a part: “Ladies and gentleman, this is your enemy. It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.”

Life was simpler when I didn’t have to understand these currents in American culture. I prefered a simpler secular view of the world.

Identity: Shifting Tectonic Plates

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The landscape below the internet identity standards war has shifted and it is notable how little comment this has raised among the mob of identity bloggers. Two things have happened. First, is the arrival of in the US of a manditory national ID card which is likely to be chock full of wild and crazy technological gadgetry. The second was the public revealing of Sun and Microsoft ongoing work to bring their identity product offerings into alignment.

Both events were in the air, both seem inevitable. Like the California earthquake. Let me take a very rough and very sloppy run at teasing out what’s really going on here.

The national ID card being brought to live by forcing states to adopt standard driver’s licences. These are likely to be choke full of this years technological widgetry, i.e. RFID tags and such. Technology like this thrives if it finds enthusiastic hosts and these widgets have found lots of those. They have been been spreading very rapidly across the installed base of entities with minimal privacy rights: kids, cattle, shipping containers. There is a huge enthusiasm in our culture for using technology to enable club gate keeping. So there are hordes of folks out there who have problems they want to solve with these toys. Highway toll keepers, prisoner’s on work release or house arrest, owners of clubs and bars that want to keep children out, financial institutions who want stronger authentication. While there is a vocal and concerned community warning that these toys and the systems they enable carry a lot of risk of damaging our social fabric that community hasn’t found a way to get a seat at the table.

The Sun Microsoft story can be read in two ways. The standard media narative has had Sun/Liberty v.s. Microsoft. If you need to maintain that story line then this is truce, defeat, or something. I don’t think that’s the right way to read these tea leaves. I think this is a story best understood by introducing another player: the buyers. Buyers do, sometimes, have some power. The buyers in this case are the CIO/CTOs of huge firms. These folks have a huge amount of pain around issues of intra-enterprise and inter-enterprise identity and data exchange. The buyers are got sick and tired of waiting on the vendors to get their act together. They need highly open dependable solutions, solutions that are not owned by one vendor. I believe that they began put pressure on Microsoft to find common ground with the folks at Liberty. Of course, that was one of the options the Liberty organisers created when they set up the effort.

I do not think that either of these events mean the standards war is over. Some days I think this could be a 100 year standards war. Lots of reasons why this story is going to have lots of chapters. The drivers licenses are amazingly expensive and states won’t swallow that expense without a fight. The huge internet portals like Google, Yahoo, AOL really haven’t entered the standards game yet in a meaningful way. The huge population of tiny web sites don’t have a useful solution at hand. We don’t know what the phone companies and credit card companies are going to do. The whole nature of how we as a culture reframe our privacy in the modern age is totally unclear.

Now, I doubt either of those stories I just constructed off the top of my head are particularly accurate. That they have garnered so little comment from the identity bloggers is a shame. They need a lot more careful picking apart than they have gotten. One way or another, the landscape is now fundimentally different.

Fundable

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Why don’t neighborhoods have a collectively owned tool shed? My neighbors and I own the most amazing amount of idle captital equipment! We each have our own hedge trimmers, snow blowers, lawn mowers, etc. etc. It is mind boggling! I’ve been puzzling about this question for years and years, because this question is a good small proxy for many big questions.

A varient of the tool shed question is snow removal. Why don’t neighbors band together to hire somebody to plow their sidewalks and driveways. There is an interesting liturature on that question. It is a really hard problem. Consider this simpler one. Say three families are interested in planting a tree. Take as a given that the cost for the tree is $200. With the help of powerful mind reading techniques we know exactly what each family is willing to donate for this project. The numbers are: $100, $75, and $50. So in theory there is enough money ($225) to plant the tree. In practice the tree is very unlikely to get planted. The project falls apart as issues of equity, fairness, debt, etc. enter into the negotiation.

One way to solve this problem is to insert a middleman. He can then obscures who paid what. Community activists often fill that role. They keep the secret. If that information got out the whole project would fall apart. If you want to kill a community activity just force the contribution levels of the various participants out into the open!

The tool shed question is more complex than the tree planting project. The tree is a one shot event, while the tool shed has all kinds of policing, maintainance, liablity, etc. etc. aspects that add complexity. Worse they add uncertainty and we all know that’s deadly to action. One reason I find Circle Lending an interesting business is how they reduce the uncertainty by doing the loan servicing if one or more people agree to lend money to an activity.

So. Take notice of Fundable.org today. They provide a place you can go if you want to raise a lump of cash, via contributions or donations. If they could keep the secret then they could be used to solve the tree purchase example.

Group purchasing is very common in the online car tuning communities. One guy offers to collect the funds from a group for a make a bulk purchase of something. Often this is an accessory that, for example, you can only buy in Japan were the car was made. He then orders, splits out the parts, and ships them off to the group members. This is exactly like community activists acting as middleman. The guys that organize these things keep secret the varations of the various participants. I notice a lot folks who do this use paypal to collect the funds. So does fundable.org.

Owning the Interuption Tax

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Differing kinds of work demand differing heartbeats. Some work thrives on high interupt rates while other work demands long intense periods of concentration. If your work demands a low rate of interuptions than each interupt will be costly. Ross Mayfield has written a series of posts looking at these costs and their allocation from various points of view. For example in his latest post he mentions that in some situations the interuption tax can be as much as 15 minutes.

I want to draw attention to how this problem has many features that hint of money to be made. You have two sides, i.e. the person who want’s to interupt and the person who to be interupted, which means there is an oportunity for a middleman. There is a lot of value in play; i.e. 15 minutes. There is a high transaction rate. The problem is unsolved. Technology has tools to offer that help, but it is also displacing the old social contracted rules. Moore’s law is in play. A problem with that structure should attract the attention of people looking for high value hubs.

This problem is related to a mess of other stuff: the efficency of exclusion, the mystery where the sweet spot is in latency/bandwidth space for collaborative work, the conventional wisdom about where how high productivity in some kinds of work requires a asynchronious work environment.