Alan Kay and Emerging Technology

I’ve been a fan of Alan Kay’s for a long time. It’s nice to see that he’s starting to develop some recent visibility in the blog world. The first thing that popped up in my aggregator a while back was this comment:

Clueful markets yield good products.

Here’s an “aha” quote from this interview with computing pioneer Alan Kay:

After complaining about the current state of software targeting children, I ask Kay how we encourage the production of better educational software for kids. He answers, “don’t buy bad stuff.”

As simple as that sounds, he points out that “the market needs to reject what is bad. The stuff that got put out wasn’t rejected. It’s a certain kind of laziness. […] On the other hand, you have to make sure people are aware of their alternatives. A popular fast food restaurant might be across the street. Meanwhile, a mile a way is a better restaurant where a good meal costs just a little more than at the place across the street. We need to help get the word out for the alternative. [Seb’s Open Research ]

Then he shows up as a keynote at etech which was heavily blogged. Lisa Rein provides a wonderfully rich collection of audio and video clips plus links to major resources. Cory Doctorow provides detailed notes from Alan’s talk including follow up corrections and elaborations from Alan. So do Phil Windley and Jon Lebkowsky.

If you’re so inclined I would definitely recommend you spend some time with Squeak and Croquet. Unfortunately, between other time demands and the lingering effects of first learning to program using Fortran and Cobol, I’ve only made the slowest progress. Alan tells me that the problem is that I just have more to unlearn.

Dan Bricklin on online piracy

Online piracy is not like shoplifting [SATN]

Pirating works online is really more like kids watching a baseball game through a hole in the outfield wall, or listening to a concert just outside the gate. There is no out-of-pocket expense for that particular copy, just a possible loss of potential revenue. If your costs are low enough and you have some sales, you can tolerate lost sales that have no expense and still actually make a profit. (It’s like some summer concerts where the patrons pay a lot to sit in seats up front while thousands of others sit on the field outside listening for free.)

More insightful comentary from Dan Bricklin. ONe of the reasons that I enjoy reading blogs is the chance to see reasoning in progress when I see so little of it elsewhere. I think what I need is a Jolly Roger flag to stick on my laptop. The RIAA and others are using the piracy meme to obscure issues rather than clarify. But with Bricklin’s perspective I conjure images of Captain Hook and Peter Pan rather than Bluebeard.

RSS feeds from Corante!

In news we hope you'll appreciate: Corante now offers RSS for its blogs!

Ad Hominem
Amateur Hour
The Bottom Line
Brain Waves
Connected
Copyfight
Corante on Blogging
Got Game
IdeaFlow
In the Pipeline
Living Code
Many-to-Many
Moore's Lore
Open Mind

We'll be adding links to them from the respective pages over the course of the day – please alert me to any hiccups you encounter. Huge thanks to the WebCrimson crew!

[Corante: Corante on Blogging]

Got an email this morning from Hylton Jolliffe alerting me to this great piece of news. Corante has been publishing some great material; now it's readily available to those of us who prefer aggregators to stay current.

The lineage of good ideas

I’ve had several comments on my post on the risks of knowledge work that I’ve misattributed the comment:

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

I attributed it to Mark Twain, but my readers believe it belongs to Abraham Lincoln. Certainly wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong on an attribution. I did a quick bit of googling to find that the quote is also attributed to Einstein and Groucho Marx among others (according to Ask Yahoo). They suggest that you can even trace this one back to Proverbs 17: 28:

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise:
and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding

Of course, in a knowledge management context, this kind of problem is interesting beyond the immediate feedback from my readers. Good ideas, like successful projects, are likely to be a product of many parents (another maxim usually associated with Kennedy, although he didn’t claim it as his own insight). Getting the record straight is only one consideration in moving from good idea to successful implementation. The value in tracing lineage isn’t so much about parceling out credit as it is about learning from both the successes and failures of others.

Online texts from National Academies Press

Free Science, Engineering and Medical Books Online. I am not lying. The National Academies Press which was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States, has more than 2,500 free, searchable, high quality books online. Some random examples: The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response [kuro5hin.org]

A useful resource to have handy BUT see this post from Terry Frazier on limitations of this.

Congratuations to Sebastien Paquet

Good news.

Last friday, the d partement d’informatique et de recherche op rationnelle of Universit de Montr al, as represented by a jury composed of profs. Guy Lapalme (president), Esma A meur (advisor), Gilles Brassard (co-advisor), Marc Kaltenbach (jury member), and Tommaso Toffoli (external examiner, from Boston University) granted me a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

The room was chock full with students, professors, friends, and family members (the department director even had to sit on the floor!). I had to give a 45-minute talk summarizing my research contributions and to field questions from the jury and the audience.

I believe it went reasonably well. Several of my friends and family members were pleasantly surprised to find that they actually understood all of my presentation and the question/answer session that followed. I was really happy to see their faces in the room. Thanks to everyone for your support!!

I am extremely grateful to my advisors, who believed in me and had courage enough to let me go way off the beaten path while supporting and advising me every step of the way. THANK YOU!

Oh, and YULbloggers Karl Dubost and Ed Bilodeau showed up and very competently blogged the event. Both wrote that the experience of being there had made them enthusiastic about doing research. That’s cool!

[Seb’s Open Research]

Congratulations to S bastien for “piling it higher and deeper”. Although it is a bit unusual, particularly for a new Ph.D., to be comprehensible to such mere mortals as friends and family :), this bodes well for Seb’s future work.

Rube Goldberg Honda Commercial

Rube Goldburgh + Honda ==> an amazing commercial.


My mom was a “gifted and talented” teacher in an elementary and middle school.  Each year her kids had to design and build a Rube Goldburgh devices to compete in the Olympics of the Mind. 

I'm sure they'd appreciate this an amazing commercial. (Flash 6 required)

[Micah's Weblog]

 

Brilliant commercial. Of course, most of the systems we live with day to day have the complexity without the payoff.

The real risks of knowledge sharing

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas!. I just love this quote from Howard Aiken:

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

So true! [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

I have a new hypothesis about why it’s difficult to get people to contribute to knowledge management systems in organizations.

Conventional wisdow says it’s because people are worried that someone will steal their ideas. I think that’s a rationalization. I think the real fear is the fear of being ignored. The fear that the knowledge I share is so obvious or trivial that no one will care. What’s the old maxim from Mark Twain? “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” (some input from my readers about the correct attribution of this quote. See my comments here for some more)

The issue may still be fear, but it’s a fear that we need to address in a very different way.

Moonset from the International Space Station

Moonset, viewed from the Space Station. This NASA website offers a streaming quicktime movie of our moon setting on the horizon, as viewed from the International Space Station. The moon turns into a squashy, pink pancake as it sets, and this science primer explains why. Link to article, Link to movie, Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog]

Something fun to end the day. Appropriate in part because my youngest boy and I are about to start work on a model of the ISS.