Here’s a dumb trick you can do with skype. Put a few 800 numbers into your contacts list; it’s best if the ones you put in have automated voice recognition. Then start a conference call and invite them all to talk to each other. Very silly.
An interesting triple.
… arguments in favour of having secret ballots …; most obviously the argument that secret ballots obscure the information needed to perfect a market in votes; so that the vote remains effectively inalienable …
These three: privacy, markets, and inalienable are deeply linked.
One of the delights of growing up in New York and going to school in Pittsburg was access to a number of authentic ethnic enclaves. Little communities that hadn’t melted into the gruel of american culture, and which, better yet, had prospered. Boston, where I now live, has some ethnic enclaves too: Chinatown, the North End, etc. Of course, our most largest segregated community is black and poor. Most people though think of Boston as the home of those smaller segregated communities, those where we house displaced populations of high school students. We keep the first segregated with the shape of the public transportation system. The second problem is kept in control by carefully walling them off in the universities.
Emegrants into a new land always try to reproduce their native homeland. I’ve read that the Spanish methodically leveled the tropical ecology in Mexico until they had reproduced the arid plains of Spain. At regular intervals some new emigrant to my town opens a small grocery store selling an assortement of foods identical that of an analagous store back in his homeland. A trunk from New York or Montreal visits once a weak so he can restock. I love these stores, but sadly they are apparently incompatible with the local social and economic climate and six to eighteen months later they close down. If we are lucky they evolve quickly into something else.
But really! I am rolling on the floor laughing to see what the lawyers at the Berkman center did when they got off the boat on the shores of the new virtual world!
This delightful summary of Extreme Programming goes a long way toward explaining why it is so attractive to a certain managerial personality type.
- Integration is a nightmare, so integrate continuously
- Writing tests is tedious, so write them first
- Social interaction for developers is often difficult, so pair all the time
- If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, so refactor mercilessly
It has Purtian over tones; e.g. that what every your staff is doing it’s very likely selfish and they are ignoring the real work.
Framing things up in that manner is good fun until sombody gets a stick in their eye. Easy to wound your enterprise by taking those rules too much to heart. For me framing the principles of extreme programming is dangerous. It councils that you ought not play to the strengths of your talent. You should strives to supress them. That’s unlikely to either attract talent or build momenteum.
That said, all the above are true to a surprising degree. In fact these same four have mimics in open source. For example we don’t pair program but we know that situating the work in a highly public way is effective both for social, inspection, and testing reasons.
Refactoring, though, is a challenge in open source because we are more typically entangled in a larger more vocal installed base. The often lower and more difuse code ownership also creates a web of entanglement (a social web) that makes refactoring a more costly exercise. In extreme programming the test suite substitutes for having a live installed bases; so there the immovable installed base problem is replaced by the immovable test suite. The good news for open source is that the public process can increase the number of voices advocating a serious refactoring.
It’s worth noting that encouraging refactoring runs counter to the advice to integrate continously. Refactoring is fundimentally a choice to buy a bag of disintegration. So the pair of them is a cruel catch 22. For open source: developers can operate in private and they can fork we do license these kinds of disintegration moments. Though we probably don’t encourage enough of them and we lack rituals from bringing them home.
I’ve got to thinking recently that there are times in the life of an open source project were the community would be wise to encourage forking in search of a way out of the box of their current architecture.
This is great…
In a sense, Google, in its ADD-driven style, is building up a sizable engineering liability here, one that it will eventually have to ‘fess up to.” — at Infecious Greed
Is it true? For the life of me I don’t know.
Network effect businesses depend on running as fast as you can to capture a large a network as fast as possible. This is amazinlgy risky balance between capturing share and avoiding “engineering liability.” Nobody knows the right balance but we do know the trends. The share v.s. low-risk dial has moved consistently toward share wins. Microsoft’s ship crap fix it later strategy got them thru the transition to GUI, and quite a few other company killing upheavals. Open Source’s ship early and often strategy has enabled it to capture installed base and hence set standards faster than more conservative tactics.
I suspect that the author of the quote above is just peeved that he’s locked into more and more Google offerings while being frustrated that they aren’t becoming the robust software he desires. If these products were open source he could join in common cause with his fellow travelers and fix them. But since his vendor is a monopolist his only option is to plead, shame, and otherwise use voice rather than doing to resolve the problems.
I find it amusing that I can get an emulator for my Vectrex in universal binary format before Microsoft can re-release Microsoft Word to run native on the new Macs.
Sad, my Vectrex 3D head set won’t work.
The Shangri-La diet Shangri-la Diet
What caught me was two things. This fun cheerful paper on “Self Experimentation” by the diet’s inventor Seth Roberts. What really did me in though was more than 30 years ago when I first became interested in cults I read my way through some marvellously silly books written by “Jane Roberts.” Jane’s gig was channeling, she would channel a dude name Seth. It’s a great exemplar of the art of speaking like a mystic; you know stuff like: “transforming invisible atoms into the dazzling theater of the world.” One side effect is that whenever I hear the name Seth I tend to get a foxy smile, and this time the name Roberts too!
I might not even have read the paper on self experimentation if it hadn’t been authored for inclusion in a book on behaviorism. I’m a huge fan of practical behaviorism; and I often recommend Jane Pryor’s book “Don’t shoot the Dog.” It’s delightful and a far better thing to read than this new diet book.
The diet turns about to be behaviorist at its core. Animals all (really all of them apparently) are very good at learning causal chains of behaviors; most of which end in food. The classic version of this is Pavloff’s dogs who he noticed would salivate when he rang the dinner bell; rather than when the food showed up. Animal trainers can do amazing things with these causal chains getting animals to walk around on two feet, jump through flaming rings, roll over, etc. etc. all just for a treat. The behaviorists have written libraries full of papers about the fine tuning of these causal chains, how to strengthen them, weaken them, extend them, etc. etc.
So the trick at the heart of Robert’s scheme is to weaken the causal chain between taste and calories. Consider the animal that has built a link between a bell and dinner. If that animal wants calories it craves the bell; it’s weird but true. Now of course a bell isn’t calories so we can weaken that link in two simple ways. We could randomly ring the bell so the animal abandons it’s illusion that these two things are linked. Plan B is we could stop ringing the bell before meals. Either will work just fine; though as the behaviorist research shows these links can be surprisingly robust if they have been trained up just right.
Robert discovered that both tricks appear to work. That he could reduce the body’s craving for food (aka taste) by either means. He could providing a lot of random tastes so it wouldn’t build a strong link between them. He even found articles in the literature of experiments where animals whose food was flavored somewhat at random – they stopped eating so much. He could also break the linkage by providing calories with zero flavor. In both cases is the outcome is a weakened causal chain between taste and calories; which in turn leads to reduced craving for food.
The theory is somewhat more complex than I’m making it here. You’d have no trouble finding a few dozen explainations if you poke around in the web. But for me I was particularly taken to see a diet based on such an extremely simple confident application of behaviorism.
I read Collaborative Circles : Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work a month or two ago and I’ve wanted to write up my thoughts since then. Clearly that’s not coming together. So let me highly recommend it, and dribble out a few thoughts.
It’s a very rare book about how groups form, what their dynamics are, the stages they move through, what roles emerge during those various stages. The groups he writes about are creative groups, artistic movements mostly. The participants are typically young and the output of the groups are tend to be significant.
The author has an overarching model with a nice narrative arc.
It’s not hard to make fun of this model since once you strip it down to it’s raw form there’s almost nothing there: get together for beers, rant about problem, plan solution, execute plan, move on. But making fun of the framework isn’t as much fun as decorating the framework with more details.
For example there are some very nice descriptions of various roles that emerge as the groups evolve.
That list is an example of why this book is so useful. It provides vocabulary, stories, and a framework for thinking about group dynamics. Real groups remake themselves continuously, moving through all the stages simultaneously. It is healthy for a group to be moving at least some on all these fronts at once.
It’s a great book. Let me thank Clay Shirky for recommending it.
The Boston Globe has a story this morning about MIT students who have trouble graduating due to the University’s insistance on a swim test as part of their graduating requirements. Meanwhile this weekend I chatted with a woman who taught art history at MIT and reported that it was a regular occurance in her classes that not one of the students had ever set foot in a mueseum.
It makes me wonder how many people appreciate what a forced march of achievement some parents put their offspring thru? How many of the students at top teir universities are at the end of these gauntlets? It’s very odd, and I see it as deeply disfunctional.
I sometimes joke when people say I have good children that it’s easy if you know the trick. The trick is to have a diverse portfolio. Have a lot of kids. Discard the lousy ones. As s an added bonus the culling has the positive of side effect of incentivizing the survivors.
While that’s a horrible joke it used be common practice. In traditional scarcity based economies parents would pass all their estate onto only one of their children. In a society where power arises from capital, and the returns are disproportionately skewed so that those with more capital are significantly more powerful than those with less a tradition of primogenitor, is totally rational.
While the universities bear some of the responsiblity for encouraing the forced march child rearing so common these days (as does the fetish for high stakes test based assesment) is the unbelievable network effects that rebound on those at the top of the pile is the central problem. Regresive taxation, increasing concentration of wealth, the privitization of all club goods, makes the loveless behavior of these parents totally rational.
Somebody wrote recently of the current situation that irony has lost it’s ablity to comfort; and then we have this example of what happens when you get real sarcasm. Nothing but nervious pained laughter has he slowly peels the skin from his audience.
That is a video, the president is sitting to the speaker’s right. In front of him is are Washington elite, guests of the Washington press core.
