Blog
Promises, promises...
7 Mar 2010
I have expended lot of effort since 2004 on understanding the concept of promises (or Promise Theory, as it has come to be known). Last year, I decided to put together everything I had written on the subject into a book, to be written with my friend and collaborator Jan Bergstra. The story of promises has not fit snugly into the precisely measured and artificial 10 page chunks that journals mandate, so putting this into a book, the whole picture will make the task of explaining Promise Theory much simpler and clearer. Of course, writing a book can take a long time, so I am posting drafts so that others do not have to wait for completion. Download
Offline, from Carlos Zafon to Lady Gaga
27 Feb 2010
I take great pleasure in the enterainment industry when it succeeds in lifting up genuinely talented individuals, who herniate through the often pathological ceiling of formulaic production values in music and film. I don't find stuff I like every day, but I am fortunate to have broad tastes. Read more
Travelling `light' into the future
13 Feb 2010
I have recently been moved to think more about the efficiency of technology... Anyone who has used Windows along side Linux on the same PC, knows about inefficiency from painful experience. Software engineering teaches programmers to be resource hogs. Read more
The Business Value of System Administration
1 Jan 2010
The status of system administrators as experts is at stake as both technology and businesses evolve. To evolve in step, professionals need to become more business aware.
How do IT departments impact on the businesses they support? How might we align tools and resources to more closely support an organization's primary goals? These are important questions that have often been glossed over when embracing Information Technology (IT), but for the past few years researchers have indeed attempted to answer them, groping for some sort of models and metrics to measure success. Here, we attempt to summarize the discussions of Business alignment that took place at the LISA/BDIM workshops over the past two years, and place the points in the context of the wider view. Read more (general version) [Short version for sysadmins]
Goldsmith on LB4-26
October 25 2009
This year is the 30th anniversary of Ridley Scott's film Alien, and in commemoration, there is a finally a digitally remastered re-release Gerry Goldsmith's brilliant film score for the movie.
The new release contains much music that was omitted previously. For me, this is one of Gerry Goldsmith's finest scores, and Goldsmith himself was one of the finest composers in the 1970s, and surely one of the most imaginative film composers of all time. Here we find him at the height of his powers, leading the way with an ensemble of biazarre instruments to top even his own brilliant soundtrack from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. No, no one is paying me to say this -- I am just thrilled by this release. And it does not disappoint -- it is just perfect for those long, dark winter nights here in Oslo, with a tube of silver toothpaste.
I have been waiting for this literally for 20 years since acquiring the original release CD, which was badly sampled and distorted in the final climax. Several conductors have attempted to re-record this music, but all of them have failed to capture the ominous power of this original recording. If you are a Mozart lover, you probably won't like this -- but if you love symphonic electricity to dazzle even Schostakovich, then you must have this in your collection.
The Nightmare of Knowledge
September 27 2009
Knowledge management in organizations is a serious and pressing issue today. As the pace of our world increases and people move more quickly from task to task, or even job to job, knowledge that is locked inside people's heads tends to remain there. Organizations spend a lot of money and resources on retraining new employees because their core processes were not well documented and could not easily be transferred to newbies. Dreaming on the other hand crosses knowledge boundaries, building linear narratives from complex networks of things we know. It is effortless and imaginative. Could the answer to Knowledge Management lie in dreaming? Read more
Running a business is a PhD
September 2009
PhD students learn unique skills in order to develop an overview of their subject: they have to understand the breadth and depths of their topic, embrace common sense, and learn to defend against every kind of criticism. To succeed they have to learn time management and task prioritization. These are exactly the skills needed to run a business. Why is it then that business and academia are such unwilling bed-fellows? Read more
Origami undone
August 2009
Earlier this year my friend Steve Pepper (of Topic Map fame) pointed me to one of the most fascinating and beautifully written books I have read in a long time: Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. Steve is a compulsive linguist. In this book, Guy Deutscher (whose name is even indicative of his multi-national life and learnings) describes the state of modern linguistics with enviable skill. It makes both fascinating reading and for a rare appreciation of the linguistic diversity around the planet.
Deutscher describes how two processes have taken us from cave-man grunts to modern day grammars: inflation of importance and erosion of accuracy. Without wanting to give away too much from his story telling (you should immediately buy the book), the answers struck me as being satisfyingly universal. Most processes, from natural evolution to IT management are similar equilibria between the powers of erosion and growth, but the we often forget about the extraordinary transformations of structure that take us from amorphous goo to specially compartmentalized: what might popularly be called self-organization. I have written on this theme several times in research and popular writing, in particular that system configuration is about grammar, because grammars and patterns are the same.
This is a topic worth thinking more about; so let me not spoil it for you by unfolding my own thoughts on the subject. Suffice it to say that much more is going to be written on this topic.
Happiness
July 2009
A couple of years ago I came across Richard Layard's book on Happiness. This book describes the research that has been done on what makes people happy. It is a fascinating discussion of the human condition using the tools of good science. Who ever said that science is cold?
Layard is an economist from the London School of Economics. He demonstrates that the happiness of society does not necessarily equate to its income. He is best known for his work on unemployment and inequality, which provided the intellectual basis for Britain's improved unemployment policies. He founded the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics,
I was indeed happy to see a conclusion that I have realized myself for some time: we are not here to punish ourselves, fulfill others' expectations, or work exclusively for pay without gratification. We only get one chance, so we should strive to be happy. It's not really very hard to understand.
Selling research by the pound
June 2009
When I look back to my student days, I recall thinking that there was something odd that happened to research during the 1980s. If I was looking for answers, i.e. real understanding, I would have to go back to papers written from the early parts of the 20th century up to about the 1970s. But after that -- chaos, or `The Rest is Noise'. Research papers seemed to disintegrate into gobbledygook or self-aggrandizing wish-wash. It was as though people had stopped trying to make their message clear, and had begun faking it.
It was unclear to me then exactly what happened or why, but today I see things more clearly. Research has become distorted by government policies and the associated bureaucracy. Research has been dumbed down -- and (clichés aside) governments really are to blame.
In modern society, academics are not valued very highly; research is often seen by many as a way for unstructured layabouts (i.e. `academics', a dirty word let's face it) to get free money for doing something that no one understands (and is therefore highly suspicious). Money spent on research is little better than social security hand-outs for people who should really get real jobs. Obviously, these people need to be reined in and controlled! (Think: What did the Romans ever do for us?)
I observe that government ministers around the world have very little schooling, and many seem to think that this means no-one else should have any either. Governments around the world have therefore tried to address this by bringing in `Quality Assurance' methods from the world of bureaucracy. ISO-9000 overdrive is now used to hold researchers to ransom.
It goes like this: value for money means Quality Assurance, and Quality Assurance means bureaucracy -- the only instrument available to bureaucrats let's face it, so naturally what they turn to when commanded to control the rebels. We try to turn research (an inherently risky and uncertain endeavour) into something like a production line, so that no matter what happens, something predictable will come out of the conveyor belt.
So, if you play the government game, churn out typically 100 pages of documentation in pre-planning, explaining exactly what you are going to find out (use crystal ball, or other technology to short circuit the process, or simply choose something trivial and unimportant to `discover'), bringing together a politically correct consortium of representatives from various countries, and your research application survives a process which is designed to preserve the political status quo of the haves and have-nots in research, and you agree to write `deliverables' (homework assignments written for committees, explaining what you did at research camp) every months or so, and attend all the meetings, and deliver audited financials -- then, and only then will funding agencies pay you a pittance to work on an approved project. You are literally guaranteed to discover nothing new, because all possibility of working on something unknown has beem abolished.
The result is a farce. Research has been mostly forced into a pattern of form without substance. People go through the motions, attend the conferences, write the papers (a minimum of 5 per year if you want to keep your money), but what comes out of it? In most cases, we've seen it all before. Research now attracts people with management skills instead of ideas. People with real ideas are rejected for not following suit. It takes real perseverence and a bit of luck to bring about anything new. And the few who dare are never heard, because the level of junk quota-papers being presented drowns out any interesting message that might be lurking in the background.
Reasearchers are writing too much and thinking too little, and the reason is: funding policy and the devaluation of academic pursuit in society.
In 2007 it reached the point where I never had time to do any honestly innovative work because of homework from an EU project. Research is supposed to be about risk. I believe absolutely that less money would be wasted and science would be served better by blindly giving away money to academics on trust, without all these overheads. Because even if only 10 percent of the money resulted in something useful, that is surely better than spending money to blow original thoughts away, clog real thinkers' heads with dehumanizing procedures, waste committee's time and feed paper mills.
After some soul searching, I decided: to hell with it. I don't need the kind of approval that is ransomed on a poverty of ethics. I will find another way to do my work -- by starting a company. No doubt government workers will jump with glee: this is exactly what we wanted all along! Now you are doing `applied research'! But the truth is government bodies have contributed nothing but dispair to this decision. By creating a funding process which favours those who like bureaucracy and insisting on maximizing publications, they have only succeeded in turning research into a garbage dump -- isolating innovators and promoting practitioners of little talent who can play the game of recycling ideas into quota publications. This costs taxpayers more than before for less result. Imagine every radio station turned to noise with a barely audible tune playing, and you will get some idea of what scientific journals and research have become.