Teaching at the University of Mary Washington

I am pleased to announce that I will be teaching a course next semester in the Computer Science Department at the University of Mary Washington next semester. Mary Washington is a small, traditional, liberal arts school located in Fredericksburg, Virgina - just three miles from my house.

The course is CPSC 104, The Internet: Technology, Information, and Issues. I am told to expect twenty students from various majors. The course fullfills one of the five "writing intensive" course requirements Mary Washington students need for graduation.

My thanks to Professor Ernie Ackermann for giving me this chance to build my academic resume.

OCLC Compromised by the Patriot Act?

At the beginning of this year, I stated my intention to request banned books from the inter-library loan system in an attempt to determine whether OCLC was being compromised by the federal government. In short, is Big Brother really watching what we read? I sincerely hoped that the answer was "no". Unfortunately, I cannot report that.

I ordered Sayed Qutb's Milestones and the US Army's Improvised Munitions Handbook from the Ashburn, Virginia Public Library. The result was that I received Milestones after a long wait (about two months - which is much longer than normal) and never did receive the Improvised Munitions Handbook after waiting over eight months. Since it and other related books are listed in the inter-library loan system, I can only conclude that OCLC has been stopped by their own supervisors or the FBI from providing the book.

My last post on this issue was Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 5.

Time Ontology in OWL

The W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group (SWBP&D) has received permission to publish the First Public Working Draft of Time Ontology in OWL. No further work on this document is expected.

This is likely to be the last official act of the SWBP&D working group, which will be closed shortly as it is operating longer than its charter allowed. Many of its ongoing activities will be taken up by the newly formed Semantic Web Deployment Working Group.

Does Story Telling Explain Religion?

Bill Moyers asked a great question of Margaret Atwood in his interview series On Faith and Reason. He noted that religious people point to a god of some form as the cause for the rain falling and the flowers blooming. Specifically, he quoted a hymn by Franz Josef Haydn putting the issue quite poetically. A scientist, he said, would not have used poetry to elegantly describe these things, but would simply offer a physical explanation. Then he asked, "We need the poetry, don't we? Are we hard wired to seek that kind of meaning in life, that only poetry, religion and writing can give us?" Atwood intelligently replied in the affirmative, noting that we are a "symbol-making" race. "We seem to need, create and exist within structures of symbolism of one kind or another."

It occurs to me that our ability to communicate verbally with each other is a fundamental part of our humanity. We tell stories in order to communicate with the most complicated entity in our world - another human being. We are hard-wired to recognize faces and to view the world through the lens of the shared experiences that we collect via stories. Stories make, use and foster analogous thinking. As we tell stories which use analogies, we invent a world view which, poetically, describes the world around us. That is as close to a definition of religion as I have been able to create.

Does that make sense? That is my story, anyway, and I suppose I'll stick to it until someone tells me a better one.

The Death of the Human-Centric URL?

I have started to notice that conference presenters are leaning away from publishing the URLs to their work. Often they simply say something like, "just Google the name of the project." It is interesting that Web search engines have become good enough that we are now relying on them to indirectly address material. We use them to enable us to tell stories (which humans remember more easily) instead of directly giving an address. Many of my colleagues now take a similar approach to Web browser bookmarks. Why bookmark when searching is often faster?

Are we seeing the death of the URL as a human-centered address in the way that the Domain Name Service replaced our need to directly communicate IP addresses? If we are not communicating URLs directly to humans, do we need to spend so much time making them human-readable?

International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) 2006

Following Software Evolvability 2006, I attended the first day of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2006), held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. on 25 September 2006.

Jean-Sebastien Boulanger of McGill University presented a tool to analyze Java programs for separating concern interfaces. They were particularly concerned with ensuring the principle of information hiding was followed when implementing interfaces. Their tool is called JMantlet and is an Eclipse plug-in. They analyzed the transaction concern in 26 versions of JBoss and, unsurprisingly, found that as the software evolved the implementations consistently became more aware of the transaction API.

Jonathan Maletic of Kent State University reported on a tool to generate documentation for method stereotypes (StereoCode). It is only for C++, but looks like a useful tool. I wish they had done it for Java. They also made use of the srcML tool to parse the raw source.

Suzanne Crech Previtali of ETH Zurich presented the best paper that I saw at the conference. Granted, I was only there for Sunday's workshop and Monday, but their work has some real promise. The paper was entitled, "Dynamic Updating of Software Systems Based on Aspects". They used an aspect-equipped JVM (Prose) to allow updates to running Java systems. Noting that classes or methods could be removed, added, modified or left unchanged, they first analyzed (automatically) which changes need to be made, then ordered those changes to prevent unwanted side effects, then inserted the updates systematically. I really liked their approach. Being a pessimist by experience, however, I did suggest to Suzanne that they not actually remove classes and methods to be removed. Instead, I suggested that they leave them there and modify them to simply throw an exception when called. Practically, because mistakes get made, there should be some more study done to ensure that this process works as advertised.

Software Evolvability 2006 in Philadelphia

I attended the Second International IEEE Workshop on Software Evolvability (program) at the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2006), held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. on 24 September 2006.

Papers referenced below should become available on IEEE Xplore.

Why is it that on the academic publication scale journals trump conferences and conferences trump workshops and yet the most interesting interactions with colleagues and opportunities for creative insights occur at workshops? I think it is an unintended consequence of the drive to publish.

The event was held at the Sheraton Society Hill on Philadelphia's Dock Street. It is a perfect location for visitors. It is close to the historic district, home to the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The City Tavern, founded in 1773, is just around the corner. I particularly recommend the sweet potato and pecan biscuits, reportedly a favorite of Thomas Jefferson.

Commodore George Dewey's flagship USS Olympia lies on the Delaware River, just two blocks from the hotel. It was an easy walk, so I toured her during the lunch break. I have often used the Spanish-American War of 1898 as an analogy for the current war in Iraq (in that it was a war of choice, opened unilaterally by the US president for bogus reasons and resulted in decades of unwanted and expensive American entanglements overseas). It was thus fascinating to stand on the bridge of Olympia, from which Commodore Dewey said, "You may fire when ready, Gridley.", defeated the Spanish at Manila and established an American territory over the objection of the Philippine resistance government. Olympia is a fascinatingly transitional example of naval architecture. She bristled with guns, has a steel hull and was the first warship fitted with a water cooler. She had refrigeration, based on expansion of compressed air (not freon). Her copper coffee boiler was thoughtfully lined with lead (!) to prevent copper poisoning. She is a wonder of space, except in the crew's quarters, which still had hammocks and co-located mess tables. Her officers staterooms were each private and furnished with heavy wooden bureaus, wardrobes and desks, much nicer accommodation than on modern warships. On the other hand, the beautiful glass-and-wood skylight above her officers' country could have been lifted from a wooden ship of the line. She carries two steel masts used for auxiliary sail (a good idea when burning 20 tons of coal per hour when at top speed) and a metal-componented "rope" ladder to her forward lookout station. The battleship New Jersey, huge, imposing and arguably an icon of the military dominance of the United States during the twentieth century, was visible at her museum berth across the river at Camden, New Jersey. The Olympia was there when the US became a military superpower and the New Jersey helped to assure its dominance for nearly a half century.

Bob Laddaga from BBN Technologies gave the workshop's keynote on self-adaptive software. Unfortunately, he, like many older geeks, insisted upon applying control theory to large-scale, non-linear systems. I understand the temptation - I learned control theory when I was young, too. That doesn't make it a good idea. He admitted that the available mathematics were insufficient to the task, but apparently didn't have a better approach. We really need to break out of industrial modes of thinking to address these problems.

Christopher Nehaniv from the University of Hertfordshire spoke on "What Software Evolution and Biological Evolution Don't Have in Common". I was predisposed to enjoy this talk because he started off by mentioning that evolutionary approaches could equally apply to memetics. He used the design of spoons over time as an example. The paper was an attempt to rigorously define the differences between the natural and software domains. They defined the term genotype as inheritable information and phenotype as everything else (non-inheritable information). We could all argue that for a while.

The workshop chair, Paul Wernick (also of the University of Hertfordshire), asked whether certain software metrics, such as loose coupling between modules or high cohesion within modules had been proven to be correct. Nobody in the room knew the answer, but they all suspected not, at least not rigorously. I really need to track down the answer to that.

I wonder if whether the problem with applying evolutionary algorithms to software will suffer the same fate as control theory as applied to software. We are desperately searching for the right analogy, but having trouble defining what a genotype, or a phenotype or evolution in general are in relation to software. Which one is more complicated, software or biological species? Humans would seem to have roughly 30,000 (rather complicated) genes, and some pine trees have roughly 45,000 much simpler genes. Are the "genes" in software systems simple or complex? In short, applying Darwinian concepts may not make sense in that software does not ncessarily have a population of discrete peers, and so population genetics may not apply directly. Software evolution may need a new theory, developed from the beginning. Taqi Jaffri of Microsoft had the same thought. We talked during a break and he suggested that software evolvability may be the more general case that the biological evolution may be the smaller special case. I tend to think of it more like the figure below:

Interestingly, Nehaniv suggested that the software lifecycle concept should be considered harmful. The reason is that the lifecycle treats a software system in isolation from the system's deployed environment and its developers' intentions. Of course, that seems to be a direct analogy to Darwinian evolution ;)

One of the participants shouted out that one may control for result, or for process, but not for both. Reference?

Chris Landauer from the Aerospace Corporation spoke on "Wrapping Architectures for Long-Term Sustainability". He noted that the three aspects of a sustainable system are functionality, the expected environment and the expected styles of use. People focus on the first, to the exclusion of the other two. That three-prong model was a theme of the workshop.

Nicely, Chris quoted a colleque as calling software the "intellectual caulking material" of our constructed complex systems. I think that applies increasingly to our society as a whole. Consider our kitchens. The refrigerator in mind contains a control board which implements a control system to minimize energy usage. That board has an EEPROM on it, which is embedded software. The designers could certainly have created a purely analog control board, or an electronic one without an EEPROM, but they didn't. They used software as a caulking material.

Wen Jun Meng from Concordia University spoke on "A Context-Driven Software Comprehension Process Model". Her team took a workflow process to enhance software comprehension. They used an OWL-DL ontology and the Racer reasoner. The system is story-based and implemented as an Eclipse plug-in.

Markus Reitz of the University of Kaiserslautern spoke on "Software Evolvability by Component-Orientation - A Loosely Coupled Component Model Inspired by Biology". This is one of the first times I have seen a model of software components based on an ant colony analogy. It looks interesting. However, there are already so many software component models in existence. This one will have to prove that it is useful and that existing ones couldn't serve. Markus claims that his model was necessary. I will have to read the paper.

Bob Dickerson's thoughtful paper on the poor state of the computer industry was read in absentia by Paul Wernick. He had a cute take on software development methodologies, calling them "like tying an elephant to a knitting needle to keep it from rampaging on". I like it. Obviously, one needs a thicker needle.

I did have to correct Paul on one point in Bob's paper. Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the hyperlink (Ted Nelson did). TBL invented the URI.

Bob has decided that procedural programming, the major means of coding and a direct result of Van Neumann's original and still-used computer architecture, is a failure. He criticized the results of procedural programming strongly. However, I tend to support Fred Brooke's view that the problem is not the encoding of ideas, it is the mapping of intent to code. I think that most problems that we have with software development are directly relatable to a failure to understand what we wanted to do.

I presented a paper on my ongoing research, entitled "Toward a Software Maintenance Methodology using Semantic Web Techniques". I added quite a bit of REST orientation to my slides, since my thoughts on the REST architectural style are newer than the paper accepted at this workshop. It was well received. I think I am finally wrapping my head around the subtlety that is REST. It will be interesting to complete the implementation and get to the user studies. I need to prove that these ideas make some positive impact.

Slinger Jansen (Utrecht University) said that my work reminded him of Anthony Finklestein at University College London. He and his students apparently developed a tool called XLinkIt. I need to see the papers.

Huzefa Kagdi of Kent State University talked about "Software-Change Prediction: Estimated+Actual". His literature review included a nice summary of approaches to mining software repositories. He noted that software change detection tends to look at a very low level of the code (within the class/function level). His tool for this work is srcML, which I would like to look at.

Per Jönsson of the Blekinge Institute of Technology spoke on "The Anatomy - An Instrument for Managing Software Evolution and Evolvability". Ericsson in Sweden has a tool known as The Anatomy. Per hopes to reverse engineer the reasons that The Anatomy helps developers and generalize the results into a software engineering style. He wanted to know if the research project made sense. I guess so, since that is basically what Roy Fielding did with the Web and REST.

Paul Wernick (yes, again) presented a paper on his ideas regarding software evolution as an Actor-Network. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) treats society as an intertwined collection of networks of interacting people, things, ideas, etc. Besides actors, the network may include mediators. Actors are constrained by their connections, as well as being free to communicate via them. Complex (in the academic sense) behavior arises. He suggests that people (both individually and as organizations) and software as peers. He thinks that treating them as separate entities might be interfering with the search for the atomic elements of software evolution. He notes that a software system is evolved consciously, it doesn't "just happen". The system influences the users, who demand changes, which creates change requests, which causes developers to change the code... An initial conclusion is that an ANT approach results in a very complex model (surprise!) and is thus difficult to understand. However, ANT could help answer "soft" questions, such as, what happens if the project sponsor loses interest?

Bob Laddaga (BBN) commented that the ANT approach might be too friendly. He sees software evolvability as more of a competition. Paul and Kirstie Bellman (Aerospace Corporation) think that there is room for both friends and enemies in ANT.

Where do requirements fit into such a model? Requirements are a dream, or illusion, shared between the actors.

Ilia Heitlager of the University of Utrecht presented "Understanding the Dynamics of Product Software Development Using the Concept of Co-Evolution". He had an interesting thought that we only use a project management philosophy to create software and that projects have to end. Compare this to product software goals: Exponential growth. Ilia is a former software startup CTO and I was amused at his observations, which sounded familiar ("real data is dirty", "Hegel's Second Law bit us").

Ilia's team implemented their own XML-based pipe description language for their Web-based product. How much easier it would have been for them to have used NetKernel and DPML/BeanShell! This highlights a real problem in the software industry. We still tend to convince ourselves that we just must reinvent the wheel. Of course, licensing is often an issue.

Ilia pointed out the Abernathy and Utterback model for product manufacturing. It relates innovation to transition time. See Figure 4 in their paper. The model was defined in 1975, but has not been picked up by the software development community for some reason. His team is interested in determining whether the Abernathy and Utterback model is applicable to software. That sounds like a really great idea.

The workshop closed with a panel discussion. There a general consensus by the end of the panel that evolution in general transcends biological evolution and that software evolution may be quite different than "decent with modification".

Kirstie Bellman: "We do our students a disservice when we tell them that Computer Science has something to do with computers. It has more to do with our own cognition." This is a good point and a nice way to say it.

Paul doesn't like the term "maintenance". We don't really maintain a software release, we really continuously add features.

Pluto's rePublic

Smithsonian Pluto Exhibit with Condolences,
originally uploaded by prototypo.

The Smithsonian Institution has a nice set of markers along the National Mall, starting in front of the National Air & Space Museum. The markers provide information about the planets in our solar system, including Pluto, and are spaced proportionally to their mean distance from the sun. Pluto's marker is a long way down the street, in front of the original Smithsonian castle.

Members of the public left condolences at the marker following Pluto's demotion to a dwarf planet by the IAU. Details of the notes at the base of the marker are available here.

I reported on Pluto's status change in the post Planet Status Resolved.

Canis Non Gratus

My dog is an Australian yellow Lab, almost eleven years old. He is a happy, easy-going character (pretty much the only one in our house!). He is happy to adjust to differing schedules, doesn't mind changing his meal times, walks himself when we are very busy and doesn't demand much. Even people who don't like dogs generally come to get along with him.

Unfortunately, he has been exhibiting a strange new behavior in the last three weeks. Every morning at around 5:30 AM, he puts his paws on my side of the bed and pants loudly. Even after I make him get down, he stares at me and pants heavily. He doesn't want to go outside, doesn't want a pet, doesn't want water, doesn't want to play. He is just suddenly quite uncomfortable. Unable to figure this out, we have taken to making him leave the room so we can sleep.

I took him to our local veterinarian. No problems. Healthy as a, err, larger quadruped.

After a couple of days, it occurred to me that he might be hearing an ultrasonic sound from our lawn's sprinkler system. It starts at about that time. So I did the obvious thing: I changed the time that the sprinkler started. No luck. At 5:30 AM I had paws on my arm and doggie breath in my ear. We were at a loss. How could my old friend suddenly become canis non gratus?

Separately, we began to suspect that the sprinkler was going off twice. The manual was unclear regarding the operation of a three-positin slider switch. Was the switch to select which of three programs would run? Or to select which of three programs you could adjust with the other controls? I had presumed the first. It was the second. Creating another program simply ran both. The sprinkler was still starting at 5:30 AM. I cleared the first program.

We waited with bated breath the next night. Would we sleep through or be jarred into full activity by our canine interlocutor? It worked. When we awoke, our dog was still sleeping peacefully. We had found the problem.

Now, what do we do with a sprinkler system buried in our yard at great expense which distresses our dog?

Apple Recalling Laptop Batteries

Apple Computer is recalling batteries for the iBook G4 and Powerbook G4 sold between October 2003 and August 2006.

The form to request a new battery is here. Unfortunately, the site is being hit so hard right now that they are rejecting users. That happens either with an HTTP error, or upon form submission stating that your serial number is invalid. Just wait your turn and it will work out :)

Planet Status Resolved

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has made its decision on the definition of a planet. Resolution 5A: Definition of 'planet' states:

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The IAU therefore resolves that "planets" and other bodies in our Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:

(1) A "planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape , (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

(3) All other objects except satellites orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar-System Bodies".

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Thus, Pluto is no longer considered a planet. Similarly, Charon, Ceres and 2003 UB 313 (which is not called "Xena" by the IAU) are not classified as planets. The proposal to do so was rejected.

I note that they begged the definition of "satellite", but that's fine with me. Categorization can easily be taken too far.

The eight planets in our solar system are now Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

I am pleased to see that the IAU made this decision carefully. Although my suggestion for a resolution was never considered, the end result is similar. We are safe from the possibility of discovering hundreds of new "planets" in our system.

webMethods buys Cerebra

webMethods has announced that it has bought Cerebra. That is almost assuredly a fire sale, in spite of the positive spin put on it by analysts.

Mulgara v1.0.0 Released

The Mulgara project is pleased to announce Mulgara version 1.0.0. Binary and source distributions are available for download now. This is the initial release for this fork of Kowari and marks the reestablishment of a development team capable of continuing the project.

Thanks to all who participated in this release. New developers and users are actively encouraged to contribute!

Northrop Grumman Drops Tucana References

Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems has dropped the Tucana pages from their Web site. No explanation has been offered.

David Watanabe Fixes the OS/X Desktop

OS/X is pretty great. Still, Joy's Law ("No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.") assures that innovation will occur outside of Cupertino. David Watanabe has done that for Internet searching and news summaries with two great products: Inquisitor and NewsFire.

Inquisitor is a search completion and suggestion tool for the Safari and Camino browsers, sort of like a built-in Google Suggest. I have been using the Safari version since 1.0.0 and it really does make my life easier. It saves time, which I never have enough of.

NewsFire is by far the best RSS news reader for Mac OS/X. Just buy it. No kidding. Safari's RSS reading cannot compare.

Rick Brant Electronic Adventures

In the early 1970s, my parents found part of an old juvenile book series in a garage sale and bought them for me. They turned out to be fourteen of the Rick Brant Electronic Adventure series and they literally set me on fire. I loved science and engineering even as a kid and dreaded the day I would finish the last one. Now my son is eight and my parents gave me the books which were still in their basement. We started reading them straight away. That let me to Amazon, Powell, Google and the very handy Abebooks to see if I could buy a few more. Happily, a reasonable sum and a bit of research netted 23 of the 24-book series plus the interesting Science Projects.

The last book in the series, The Magic Talisman, goes for a cool US$1500 these days. Only 500 were printed. That is strange, considering the series sold into the millions of copies. Publishers are certainly fickle. Fortunately, OCLC's WorldCat service shows that four US libraries have the book, so it should be available via inter-library loan.

Hal Goodwin, a US government journalist who involved himself in radically different aspects of science during his varied career, wrote the series under the pen name John Blaine. He was amazingly prolific, writing 43 books, including some children's non-fiction.

I was pleased to find that other fans of the series banded together to get some books reprinted. Spindrift Books, a reference to the island home of Rick and his family, has recently reprinted three hard-to-find books. The main fan site even has detailed errata for the series.

My son is thoroughly enjoying the series and I am pleased that he won't suffer the loss of many of the books as I did. I am enjoying reading them, especially the ones that are new to me. They provide a wonderful opportunity to talk about science, geography, cultures, logic, observation. We are looking forward to making some of the Science Projects, especially after seeing the warning, "Note: These experiments have not been written with the modern reader in mind. Some may be dangerous and should not be undertaken." All right! That reminds me of the time I showed some friends at a dinner party how to make ozone by splitting a lamp cord and shoving it into a sink full of water while it was plugged in. (You can smell it.)

I highly recommend these books to anyone with a boy between the ages of 8 and 12.

Mulgara v1.0.0 Coming Any Day Now

Paul and I are on the last bits of documentation and legalities to release Mulgara v1.0.0. It should happen really soon.

New Planets Proposal

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is considering a proposal that would finally define a planet. The proposal is:

- The object must be in orbit around a star, but must not itself be a star
- It must have enough mass for the body's own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape

Ceres, Pluto (and Charon) and 2003 UB 313 will all qualify under the new definition.

Personally, (and the IAU didn't ask me!), I'd rather add a criterion like:

- It must have sufficient gravity to sustain an atmosphere if conditions would support one.

I think that would eliminate the silly little bodies and still offer some way forward. Do we really want a hundred "planets" in our solar system?

Multitouch Computing

If you are the least bit interested in human-computer interface designs, you owe it to your self to check out Jeff Han's talk at TED 2006. My vote for best quote goes to "There is no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device". Thanks to Brian for the pointer.

Application of the Anthropic Principle

Island, over at Science in Crisis, asked me to comment on his post Global Warming too?... what next, politics? after reading my thoughts regarding Critics of Global Warming. I am going to duplicate my thoughts here for archival purposes:

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Island was kind enough to invite me to comment on this discussion. I am pleased to do so, since we can all learn if we all talk.

It would seem at first reading that Island believes in the strong anthropic principle, whereas I believe in the weak anthropic principle. The two are very different, indeed. The strong version insists that everything will always work out because we are meant to be here. I think that is a great way of burying one's head in the sand.

I am an evolutionist, for the simple reason that the evolutionary algorithm is testable and, further, I have tested it with computer models. It is a simple and elegant theory which explains much. The evolutionary algorithm has ramifications for this discussion because it can explain our likely future if we continue to "piss in our rice bowl". I once created a small agent model to show what happens to a human society when they overreach their environment's capacity to support them. Try it. Read the text under the applet and then try running the model with the default settings. Then try varying the settings. Download the source code and look at the algorithms I used. In many, many cases, humans simply starve to death. All of them. The environment eventually recovers. Unless you can find a reason to dispute the underlying presumptions of the model, the result should cause you to agree with David Suzuki: The Earth is not in trouble. We are.

The weak anthropic principle, on the other hand, states that, of all the possible ways the universe could have evolved, at least one of them had to allow us to evolve. No hand of God is implicated, in spite of Island's suggestion to the contrary. The weak anthropic principle makes no claim about our future at all. It does not guarantee our safety. It does not suggest that the universe is not a dangerous place. It leaves room for us to become just another evolutionary dead end. It is up to us to stop that from happening. We have a better chance of manipulating the situation for our own survival than any species before us, but we have to work for it.

The economic principle the Tragedy of the Commons illustrates our situation best. Humans have become the undisputed top predator in our environment. No other species threatens us now. As we compete with each other, we fall into the Tragedy of the Commons, where the common good is subsumed by short-term greed. That was not critical to the entire species before, although we certainly saw the effect when the Greeks destroyed their farming centers through poor irrigation, Rome devastated Libya's fields and China began its cycle of spasmotic famines. Now the Commons stretches across the globe. We only have two choices: Allow the Tragedy of the Commons to play out once again, collapsing our civilization the way it has collapsed others or agree that the common good really should take precedence this time.

More on Faith and Reason

Weeble had an interesting post on Faith and Reason. It is an endless topic for our generation, but I'll wade in again anyway.

Readers interested in the relationship between intelligent design and science may be interested in my post on refuting irreducible complexity, a cornerstone of the current intelligent design concept.

My wife, a thoughtful woman wishing to find a way of thinking which encompasses spirituality and science, recently suggested that I read The Language of God. Unfortunately, I think upon review that author and scientist Francis Collins violated the useful thumbrule of Occam's razor. William of Occam, himself a Christian friar, said in the 14th Century that "the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory." Collins may also have confused the strong and weak versions of the anthropic principle, but I haven't read enough to confirm that yet. Certainly the strong version is used as an argument for intelligent design and the weak version is a common scientific belief.

Economic Recursion

Dan has cracked the code on computer upgrades. He decided to buy Apple shares to finance the purchase of his new Apple PowerMac. Apple's success is therefore key to getting Dan's business. Not only is this conceptually pretty cool, it occured to me that it is not even uncommon. We all do this sort of thing every day. We buy clothes and wear them to the store where we bought them. We buy gas and use it to drive to a service center to keep our car running, where we buy parts and use them to get us to a gas station. I suppose this sort of circular consuming and producing is the basis of any economy bigger than simple subsistance agriculture, where each individual makes most of what they need themselves. Perhaps this is obvious to economists, but I thought Dan's solution was an elegant one (in a bull market). It certainly got me thinking about how all parties in a complex economy depend on each other.

Perhaps the high degree of economic interdependence explains why societies can collapse so rapidly when the social contracts needed to run them are disrupted. I am thinking about Iraq, of course, but it seems this is the basis for a simple economic argument against breaking a country's social system. They are easy to break, but hard to repair.

Mulgara's Initial Release

Mulgara is going ahead. The initial release looks set for the end of this month (July 2006). This first release will be based on an older version of Kowari from 1 August 2005. That date will avoid any code contributed to or by Northrup Grumman Corporation, even though their recent correspondance allows its use. It will also avoid a reported scalability bug while we investigate.

Unfortunately, several old Kowari bugs will temporarily reappear in Mulgara, but users may expect them to be quickly repaired. Those bugs include the lack of permanent model names and the presence of the Jena API and RDQL support.

Perhaps Mulgara can one day recombine with Kowari. The Mulgara team remains open to that possibility, but needs to move forward without waiting for further talks. Users are encouraged to follow Mulgara for new features in the meantime.

Northrop Grumman Backs Down on Kowari

Northrop Grumman Corporation has sent an email affirming that the code currently checked into Kowari's Sourceforge project is "non-proprietary, open source software, licensed freely to all under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1". They have dropped their claim that some of the code is tainted.

The Northrop lawyer specifically referred to their letter to me last January and apologized for its results.

Mulgara developers are discussing what impact, if any, this news will have on the fork.

Ant Pedometers

Agent modeling is looking as an even more powerful mechanism for modeling the real world. Ants, it seems, count their steps in a form of simple dead reckoning. Thanks to Nova Spivack for the pointer.

Brains for Phenotypic Advantage Over Environment?

I had a thought in January 2004 while re-reading Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and thinking about Jared Diamond's postulated "Great Leap Forward" in human capacity 50K years ago.

Consider that humans "suddenly" exploded all over the face of the earth 50K years ago. This is a big deal because all other species are constrained to a bounded habitat. This event was almost certainly the result of an increase in human brain capability.

Dennett says we are allowed to take the "intentional stance" when trying to understand evolutionary phenomena. That is, we can ask what something is "good for". Indeed, he says that the intentional stance is necessary for any real reverse engineering effort.

So, taking the intentional stance, we can say that the mutation that spread through human brains 50K years ago was "good for" spreading human phenotypes into new habitats.

Now, genes don't care about environment. Environments impact genes' ability to survive. Phenotypes care a *lot* about the environment, but they are stuck with the hand they are dealt.

I think it makes sense to think about the mutation that caused the "Great Leap Forward" as a mutation for allowing (fixed) phenotypes to extend their habitat (by thinking, having better mental maps of cause/effect relationships, whatever). Phenotypes which could have the option of moving to better environments could presumably breed more, embedding the mutation in the gene pool.

Humans can survive in difficult environments (e.g. Siberia) by thinking and by passing down "good" thoughts ("memes") via cultural transmission. It seems to make sense that our distant ancestors did not have that capability, and so were limited to more forgiving environments for their phenotypes (e.g. equatorial Africa).

This difference in phenotypic capability is certainly modelable, but I am not sure whether the model could be tested against any hard evidence. At best, one could show that the modeled capability is one possible mechanism that would allow humans to survive in Siberia (a mutation that gave you blubber being another!). That's OK, since there are many possible paths through Darwinian design space and I think the best anyone can show would be a valid path, which might differ from the single path actually trodden by humans without further evidence from genetics/archaeology/etc.

Memetic Nature of Sexual Selection?

What if the phenomena that we associate with Darwin's sexual selection (e.g. large breast size in humans, hair/eye color and other properties which cannot be traced to advantage reinforced by natural selection) are a consequence of memetic imitation? In other words, the underlying mechanism of sexual selection is memetic imitation in the same way that the underlying mechanism of natural selection is genetic survival.

That would be consistent with Schelling's neighborhood, the observation that people tend to prefer mates of a physical form to those encountered in childhood and possibly Jared Diamond's comments in The Third Chimpanzee regarding sexual selection.

Critics of Global Warming

K and my father both pointed to Prof. Richard S. Lindzen's article on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal

Prof. Lindzen wrote a justified diatribe on both Al Gore's approach in his movie and various hyperbolic media statements regarding the ramifications of global warming. He specifically said that there is no "consensus" within the scientific community for global warming.

There is no "consensus" for the simple reason that there is no "community" and there is no mechanism for "consensus" other than polls by journalists. Daniel Dennett, the Tutfs University philosopher famous for his missives on evolution, once said that any new idea in science goes through three stages:

  1.  "That can't be right!"
  2.  "Well", in the face of overwhelming evidence, "you might be on to something..."
  3.  "Of course!  Everybody knows that."

Those stages constitute "consensus" in the scientific community. Note that there could very well be a fourth stage when the notion enters school text books. I think that global warming is somewhere between stages (2) and (3).

Prof. Lindzen has most probably fueled the ill considered media storm that he dislikes. His article was aimed at the media and politicians coming to the wrong conclusions, but he failed to highlight where consensus does occur. He did say:

- "Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998."

- "There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today."

- "Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming."

He made the point that the Earth's climate is dynamic, and it surely is. Understanding the Earth's climate is probably harder than rocket science and for the same fundamental reasons. Rocket combustion is complex (in the scientific sense of the word) and so is the climate. There are too many variables which interact to too many ways to measure.

So, what is going to happen? We don't know. Al Gore said it, Prof. Lindzen said it and I've just said it. However, consider this. We do know that we have been polluting the air, water and land all around us since the industrial revolution and are continuing to do so at an increasing rate. We do know that badly polluted areas are difficult to live in (such as Mexico City) or even impossible (such as Prypiat, Ukraine). Should we continue to pollute at such a rate until the science is 100% accurate in its ability to predict the future, or should we reduce our pollution rates?

Why We Will Face Severe Global Warming

OK, this post is going to be about global warming. I have my flak jacket on and I can take it. Bring it on. Unlike just about everyone I know who talks about this issue, I HAVE DONE THE MATH. So there.

As a student at the Naval Postgraduate School from 1989-1992, I took a mandatory class for my major on remote sensing of the Earth's environment. We spent some weeks of that course (OC3520 - which now seems to be called OC3522) going over the detailed evidence for and against global warming. The result at the time (1990) was that the statistics were inconclusive - global warming was then a theory and more data needed to be collected to find the truth. The lack of data gave rise to NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, a series of five satellites which collected the necessary data in the mid and late 1990s. Substantial new core samples were taken in both polar regions. The supercomputer centers at the national laboratories (including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where I worked before moving to Australia) were turned from a primary mission of nuclear blast modeling (since the Cold War had ended) and put onto the modeling of the Earth's climate. I used to van pool to Livermore with the scientists doing that work. Their results, and confirmations from Russia and Europe, have shown conclusively both that global warming is occurring and that greenhouse gas emissions created by humans are the primary culprit.

The science on global warming has coalesced only in the last five years. Anyone who says that there is still substantial debate on the existence of a trend of global warming and that human pollution is largely responsible is no longer up to date. Debate remains on many smaller details, most of them related to the rate of temperature increase and what to do about it.

The scientific community is as united today on global warming and the need to urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions as they are on, say, evolution. That is, many scientists still debate the details and a few even object entirely, but the base concepts are quite mainstream.

Today I saw a recorded interview with Sen. James M. Inhofe (Republican from Oklahoma and chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works) who stated that the entire global warming "scare" was simply a "hoax". Later I found a floor speech by Inhofe on a Climate Change Update, in which he lays out those views in detail. Now, this guy HAS NOT done the math and possibly doesn't know anybody who has, and yet he chairs the U.S. Senate's environmental committee? Inhofe and powerful people like him simply will not listen. That is why the United States, as the world's largest contributor to global warming, will not sign the Kyoto Protocols. That is why Gore's movie is falling on deaf ears. President George Bush has even stated that he won't see The Inconvenient Truth. In short, that is why global warming will devastate a substantial percentage of the world's biodiversity in our lifetimes and we will sit back and watch it happen. No amount of talking can cure an ignoramus.

Part of the problem is that climate change is treated as a split issue in the popular press, but not in scientific journals. This article in Science, for example, describes a study of 928 peer-reviewed scientific abstracts which agreed that global warming was occuring and that humans were responsible. Contrast that with Google Trends, which shows no increase in Internet searches for the topic for the last couple of years. People, it would seem, are happily following the tragedy of the commons right into the future. It is not that humans aren't predictable, they are all too predictable. They (we!) simply don't seem to want to face the consequences of our actions. But we will, like it or not.

Even if the popular press pulled their head out and the US Government decided to support Kyoto, we still live in a country too spoiled to change rapidly.

I am not just talking about doing something. My family has planted trees and bushes in the last four houses we have owned. We installed solar hot water heating in one house and are investigating options for doing it in our new house. Neither I nor my wife drive much - we work from home. We grow some of our own herbs and have started planting vegetables. We recycle as much as we are allowed to. We use air conditioning as little as one or two days per month in summer. What are you doing?

Alas, my neighbor just cut down 69 trees. I can't undo the damage and can't even get him to discuss why that might not be a great idea. Nor can I compete.

Suck for the Cure

The vacuum cleaner company Oreck and The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation are sponsoring Clean for the Cure, a fund raiser for breast cancer research. In short, you buy a pink vacuum from Oreck and $50 goes to the charity. Naturally, my wife bought one when we needed a new vacuum.

Now I am stuck with a hot pink vacuum cleaner.

I would have gladly bought a green one and given $50 to the Komen Foundation if asked. I wasn't asked. *sigh*

Microsoft and RDF

Microsoft once supported RDF as a standard. What would the Semantic Web have looked like if the browser wars had not diverted that early enthusiasm? Here's the proof, a bag given to Eric Miller at the W3C in the early days of the standard development:

RailsConf 2006

I just returned from RailsConf 2006, the first official international Rails conference. It was a bust, sort of and great, sort of. First conferences are just hard to make right.

I like Rails and have spent about a month coding with it. That put me in advance of many of the sessions in terms of lessons learned. Still, all the right people were there and the conversations were worth while. The keynotes were pretty great. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to keep me in Chicago past the middle of Day Two.

No Fluff, Just Stuff founder Jay Zimmerman helped organize the conference but did not assist in program selection. It might have been better if he did. Day One talks failed to impress me at all (with the notable exception of Adam Keys' talk entitled, "AC/DC, Stravinsky & Rails", which gets points for originality of thought). I poked at Adam during his talk a bit because he inadvertantly projected his notes beforehand and I read them off the screen. Sorry, Adam, if you are reading this. I couldn't help myself. You still got the laugh you were after, perhaps more so, so no harm done.

I only learned something really valuable in one session (Justin Gehtland's talk on Streamlined). Scott Raymond's Day Two talk on lessons learned from a Rails deployment was interesting, especially his concept that software development methodologies ignore the third leg of Vitruvius' Triangle, venustras, but that had little to do with Rails.

Martin Fowler, always an interesting speaker, gave a solid keynote on the first evening. He noted the failure of software systems to deliver every feature demanded (what I would call a "100% solution") and actively promoted smaller, more focused systems like Rails (which Martin labeled "postmodernist software"). It would seem that we have officially entered the era of opinionated software and have buried bloatware. The king is dead, long live the king! We certainly don't need another EJB in the world. Martin went on to opine that the combination of different patterns written in different speciality platforms will be important. Since Rails has yet to hit large enterprises, it will be interesting to see how this is handled in practice. There is room for both research and trial in that field!

Paul Graham gave the after-dinner keynote on Friday. It was interesting to see him in person. He was intense, smart and very, very worried. He was preparing his keynote while the band set up, stealing all the attention and making lots of noise. I took his picture, which he noticed. I told him, "I didn't take your picture because you are famous, I took it because you are famous, rich and successful and yet still look miserable." He complained about the band and opened his keynote with the story. That's my life - subtly influencing the rich and famous. It is a fun, if questionable, niche. Paul's keynote was entitled, "The Power of the Marginal" and suggested that innovation ceases once you become well known. It was well written and well presented, but sad. I felt like offering him a job afterward.

Why the Lucky Stiff and the Thirsty Cups played the first night. Why is brilliant, but insecure. He peppered his hard rock-'n-roll with Flash vignettes and obfuscated Ruby code. He has so much talent and seems to have built his sound effects devices himself. One of the attendees told me he once saw him recompile a Linux kernel device driver for his gear *during a concert*. That rocks, regardless of the music.

Comparing Mapquest and Google Maps

I have used MapQuest for a long while (in Internet terms), but thought I would give Google Maps a try. The result? An extra hour from Columbus, OH to Chicago, an extra hour from my parents house to Columbus and an extra hour from my house to my parents. Yuck! I think they took the Beta marker off a bit soon.

Both routes and times on route were off. I can generally beat or match MapQuest times as it is. Perhaps the Google Maps time algorithm thinks I'm traveling with my wife and kids...

Jim Hendler to Move to RPI in 2007

Professor Jim Hendler, Director of the University of Maryland's MIND Lab where I work will be moving to RPI in the summer of 2007. The press release is here. Congratulations, Jim!

I will move on from the MINDSWAP project when Jim leaves.

Secret of the Code

B and I saw The Da Vinci Code movie tonight. Unlike seemly most others, I thoroughly enjoyed it. But then, we had both read the book and therein lies the movie's secret.

Ron Howard is a very, very good director. The photography was superb and Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou did solid jobs as the leads. Most criticism has stemmed from the inability to condense the weighty novel onto the big screen. My supposition is that they didn't really try.

The movie would be confusing and fragmented to those who had never read the book. Then again, over 45 million people have read the book. Isn't that a market in its own right? I suggest that the movie was aimed at the proven audience who had read the book, who understood it already and who would like to add Hollywood-style visuals and special effects to their experience of the story. That certainly worked for me.

Two Types of Yoga

My friend Mark recently told me that there are two types of yoga. I present them here for your edification:

Yoga from India:

Yoga from Horsetralia:

I wish (Oh, how I wish!) that I could take credit for these, but they were forwarded from Mark via a South African mailing list. Unfortunately, they were ungoogleable, so I served them. We wouldn't want them to be lost to posterity! Please comment if you know who should get attribution.

New Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C

Eric Miller has announced his imminent departure from the World Wide Web Consortium as Semantic Web Activity Lead. Eric has been Activity Lead for the last five years and was instrumental in producing the core technical infrastructure standards (RDF, RDFS and OWL). He has recently directed the formation of working groups to work on rules interchange and life sciences, as well as continuing SemWeb deployment work. The 2006 Semantic Web Activity Proposal summarizes the state of the Activity and future plans. Eric is rumored to be heading for a more hands-on development role somewhere in the SemWeb space.

Ivan Herman will take over the role of Activity Lead in July.

I am pleased to call both men friends and wish them well as they change roles.

OWL-DL Ontology of Software Engineering Concepts

I have created a simple OWL-DL ontology of software engineering concepts and posted them on my UQ site.

• OWL-DL ontology of software engineering concepts (Source and OWLDoc)
• Example of use of the above ontology of software engineering concepts (Source and OWLDoc)

A Big Week for the SemWeb

This has been a busy week for the Semantic Web. Some of items of interest:

TopQuadrant has released a new SemWeb ontology editor (implemented as an Eclipse plug-in) called Top Braid Composer. There is a free evaluation, but a commercial license. The differentiator from Protégé and SWOOP seems to be a greater attempt at visualization.

The Semantic Web and Multimedia Group, Universita' Politecnica delle Marche, Italy, released version 0.4 of DBin, a P2P/SemWeb project for "building Semantic Web communities". The project is under the GPL.

Mark Birbeck has posted his presentation on RDFa for XTech 2006. RDFa (formerly known as the less Googleable RDF/A) is an up-and-coming way to represent metadata in XML, especially XHTML, documents.

Alistair Miles has posted his paper on the requirements for the standardization for SKOS.

Tim Berners-Lee has made public his final draft report on the MIT-W3C DAML program. In the conclusion, he expresses his ideas for the conditions necessary to make the Semantic Web a reality. I think he was pretty honest about the challenges.

State of the SemWeb According to Google Trends

Weeble introduced me to Google Trends, a new way of tracking trends of Web search terms.

A search for "Semantic Web" yielded some interesting and surprising results. Firstly, the search term activity seemed to have peaked a couple of years ago. Perhaps that is not surprising since that was when RDF and OWL were standardized. Secondly, the regions which lead the pack in searching for the term are:

1. Korea
2. Greece
3. Iran
4. Ireland
5. Singapore
6. India
7. Austria
8. Malaysia
9. Taiwan
10. Hong Kong

Now, I knew that the Europeans were ahead of the US, so Greece, Ireland and Austria didn't surprise me, nor did the US's absence. Korea, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong are all well-known high-techers, so that's OK. But Iran?

Big Brother Should Be Watched

Unsurprisingly, the news media and the US government continue to misunderstand the central issue in the domestic spying revelations I mentioned in Should We Trust Big Brother?. The real story is protecting the civil rights of individual citizens from abuses, not everyday business-as-usual.

The news media have focused on whether or not Americans object to the NSA trolling their telephone records (they don't, by a 65% majority) and the likely prospects of General Michael Hayden to be confirmed as the next head of the CIA.

However, consider the following scenario, where innocent people may be harmed for political gain.

By all reports, including the President's, the NSA has gained access to telephone call records in an attempt to track who terrorists are speaking to in the US. Let's say that a terrorist on a watch list calls a dry cleaner in New York City. Let's further stipulate that the dry cleaner is a legitimate business who is not part of any illegal activities. Lots of other people will use that dry cleaner and some will make calls to them. The NSA will not be able to assume that the dry cleaner is legitimate and so will have to analyze the second degree of contacts. Did the dry cleaner make or receive any calls from known criminals or terrorist suspects?

Perhaps our dry cleaner also services a local politician and his family. Perhaps one of them has made a call to a 1 900 service, or a brothel or just happened to use the same dry cleaner of a terrorist suspect.

Could our leaders resist the urge to use this knowledge for political gain? Surely, some will. History tells us unabashedly that some will not. The theory of six degrees of separation suggests that we are more closely connected to each other than we may think. Should such closeness be used against us, by default and without legislative or judicial oversight?

Thus, without a carefully crafted system of checks and balances (to include warrants), it is my strong opinion that American civil liberties will be damaged by the current system.

I have no objection to the NSA being allowed to do its job! I do, however, believe strongly that trust is earned and not to be given lightly. Trust, say the Russians, but verify. I have yet to hear a single voice raised to explain why the NSA should not be required to get a warrant to access, much less follow, the trail of information available in telephone records.

Should We Trust Big Brother?

USA Today reported today that the NSA is keeping a large database of telephone call records for US citizens, with the raw data being supplied by the large telecom carriers. No surprise there. Still, here are some thoughts on the subject:

One one hand, the limits of current technology would suggest that the NSA would probably need such a database in order to query it for the specific call records they want to find, such as those related to Al Queda, their associates or their correspondents. I can think of no better way to solve the problem, especially when queries may be made during investigations well subsequent to the calls themselves.

On the other hand, I can understand the concerns of citizens not wishing the government to attain, or retain, this information at all. Is there to be no expectation of privacy for any electronic communication? That would engender a great change to the way Americans conduct themselves, especially given the trend to use so many new forms of electronic communications channels.

On the gripping hand, can we trust the NSA and the Administration (any Administration) not to yield to temptation? If we allow them to collect and hold that information, can we trust them not to mine the data? Does not the memory of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover suggest that we should not trust George Bush quite that much?

In any society, there are those who will gladly violate the rights of others just because an authority figure told them to. Just where are the checks and balances on executive power under that scenario?

I have to object. On balance, it appears that President Bush is willing to trade a resonable expectation of electronic privacy for a better chance (chance!) of catching a small number of terrorists. I am not. The public good is better served by refusing to become a police state.

For Fathers Only

A friend who prefers to remain anonymous has started a blog on fatherhood. I give him credit for his tagline:

"I used to think I could be a better dad. Then I reset the bar and reminded myself, 'Some animals eat their young.'"

Drawing Grass

Jonathan just pointed me to the Grass Tutorial, showing how an artist used Adobe Photoshop to draw grass. It is definately worth a look by anyone interested in seeing how digital art is progressing.

Physicists Get Water to Flow Uphill

Physicists working at the University of Oregon's Linke Group have harnessed the Leidenfrost effect to make water flow uphill using only heat and a carefully-shaped surface. The BBC has the story and a video.

The plan is to harness this effect to automatically cool microchips.

Just when I thought all interesting physics was non-classical...

USB Memory Devices and Mac OS X

For many years (about 13) I had a low user id number on my various Unix boxes of 112. This was a hangover from the old days of Sun OS 4.1.3 when anything under 100 was restricted. I carried this uid from Sun OS to Solaris to Linux to Mac OS X because I routinely used NFS (which operates on the uid) and didn't want my systems administrators to have to change my uid on all file servers.

I finally made the switch to a high uid (above 500 - the new standard) when I bought a PowerMac G5 last year. That made switching the files from my Powerbook G4 much more difficult, but not impossible. I thought I was done.

Then something strange happened. In a seemingly unrelated series of events, my three USB memory sticks started to leak capacity. A particular 1 GB stick would only hold 40 MB, even though there were no files on it! I found the problem today. My old uid had raised its head one last time.

Mac OS X segments files on removable media by - you guessed it - uid. The file structure on the 1 GB USB stick had these files on it:

[macaw]$ file .*
.:                        directory
..:                       sticky directory
.DS_Store:                data
.TemporaryItems:          directory
.Trashes:                 directory
._.TemporaryItems:        AppleDouble encoded Macintosh file
._.Trashes:               AppleDouble encoded Macintosh file

The .TemporaryItems and .Trashes directory were full of files owned by my old uid - which my new uid had no right to delete. The solution was to use sudo on the command line to simply remove those directories and their associated files (including the top-level ._.* files). Ejecting the device and remounting it showed a comfortable 976.1 MB.

Kowari is Forking. Welcome, Mulgara!

The unofficial Kowari fork is about to become official. The new name will be Mulgara, another Australia marsupial which is remarkably similar to a Kowari :)

The Mulgara Web site is partially up. The domain is obviously registered and an Apache server is responding on a Fedora OS. Check back soon for more news!

Andrae's Subversion repository is rumored to be opening for public submissions shortly, as well. In the meantime, source and binary code for Kowari "version 1.2" are available.

It will be a relief to get this project back on track given the substantial customer interest expressed since January. I look forward to participating in the Mulgara project.

New WordNet in RDF

The latest version of Princeton University's WordNet has been made available in RDF by the WordNet Task Force of the W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group. The new RDF version is here.

This conversion is based on the newest RDF/OWL Representation of WordNet document, now being considered for First Working Draft status.

China and Asymmetrical Warfare

Victor Corpus, a former Phillipine armed forces chief of intelligence, wrote an interesting peice for the Asia Times Online entitled, "If it comes to a shooting war ..." about a potential shooting war between the US and China. There were ideas of interest; (a) Foriegn military officers are seriously considering the consequences of the current US policy of pre-emptive strike and (b) America's military might is insufficient to achieve its stated goals. The latter point was made by way of highlighting American forces vulnerability to asymmetrical warfare.

One aspect of assymetical warfare was certainly demonstrated on 11 September 2001. A handful of terrorists conducted a very effective bombing raid on New York City, killing thousands. Nations, however, can also conduct asymmetrical warfare. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies reported on China's anti-sattelite weapons capability in this article: China's Space Capabilities and the Strategic Logic of Anti-Satellite Weapons

Thanks to Nova Spivack for blogging a pointer to the first story.

Current Kowari JARs ("version 1.2")

Andrae's company Netymon has kindly hosted an unofficial Kowari fork in lieu of a resolution with Northrop Grumman. Andrae has posted source and binary code for Kowari "version 1.2", which is what he is calling the natural completion of the release originally scheduled for January, 2006. Hopefully this will ease the pain of those waiting for an official release.

Netymon is also hosting source and binary for a version of Kowari with Andrae's latest iTQL extension.

Guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability

The RDF/Topic Maps Task Force of the W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group has a new draft of its document, Guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability.

This document is not yet a public working draft, but it still has interesting things to say about the topic. Public comments are welcome to public-swbp-wg @ w3.org.

Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group has published Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web as a Working Group Note.

In Semantic Web languages like RDF and OWL, a property links two individuals or an individual and a value. The Note presents patterns and considerations for representing relations between more than two individuals or values.

Thanks to the Ontology Engineering and Patterns Task Force for producing this Note.

Kowari's Legal Status

One positive outcome of Kowari's ownership and control scuffle has been the number of companies, some large, who have come out of the woodwork in support of the project. And they have lawyers.

The Kowari community has been assured that corporate lawyers, including some who were involved with the writing of the Mozilla Public License version 1.1, have reviewed the situation and that Kowari is safely and in perpetuity an Open Source project. That is, Northrop Grumman Corporation may not stop a fork of the code should that become necessary. That is reassuring news for the development team and should also help to reassure Kowari's user base.

Hopefully, Northrop will take steps shortly to make good on their promises of openness so that a fork can be avoided.

Although I am not under NDA with most of these companies, I will refrain from naming names except in one case. I was contacted (via a mutual colleague) by Eben Moglen, the patriarch if not the father of Open Source law, while in Australia a couple of weeks ago. His offer to help resolve the situation added substantial comfort. Although nobody wants a fight over Kowari's intellectual property rights, it is clear that the Open Source community is on firm legal ground.

The one murky issue is Kowari's trademark. Northrop owns it and the MPL v1.1 explicitly excludes trademarks from the license. Since Northrop has not, and most probably will not, license the use of the trademark to the Open Source community, one has to assume that we cannot use it. That means that we can build projects or products with Kowari, but we can't claim it in an advertising sense. The only references would be in required legal documentation and in the package names. That issue alone may force a fork to occur, since branding is important to Open Source developers too.

I should mention that I have still not had direct dealings with Kowari since resigning in January, although I hope that can change in the near future. If Northrop plays ball, so will I. If the project forks, I will follow the fork.

Experimenting with Advertising

I have, with some trepidation, turned on Google ads for this blog. Only public service ads are showing for the moment, until Google's lawyers review and approve my application.

Mostly, I am curious to explore the world of online advertising. I occasionally provide advice to a friend's Internet advertising company and need to have more personal experience with the space. Too, I am always surprised at how many people read my drivel, so perhaps the income will outweigh the disadvantages. If that does not turn out to be the case, I will turn it off.

Gee, HP Really Does Suck...

I stumbled on this little gem today while browsing software engineering faculty at the University of Maryland: HEY, HP, ARE YOU LISTENING????. It was written by Assoc. Prof. James Purtilo and mirrors my experiences nicely.

I've complained in the past about HP's software (see Why Does HP Software Suck? and Part 2).

Prof. Purtilo's staff page is also the home of this nifty tidbit:



"Somewhere, something went terribly wrong"? According to Jared Diamond, that something would be the migration of human food production to agriculture. Strangely, that correlates with this image :)

SPARQL Specifications are now W3C Candidate Recommendations

The W3C Advisory Committee has announced that the three SPARQL specifications are now W3C Candidate Recommendations. This is big news for the Semantic Web community. Congratulations to the DAWG!

The specifications are:

SPARQL Query Language for RDF
SPARQL Protocol for RDF
SPARQL Query Results XML Format

The State of Oz

I am in my third week visiting Brisbane, Australia. I have always loved living here and this trip has been no exception. We are in our old house, our tenants having vacated just before we arrived. There was a lot of work to be done on the place, mostly due to the climate. Overgrown gardens needed trimming, mold grows fast when plumbing leaks, termites in a section of a retaining wall (but not the house!). Nothing unexpected for Brisbane. All of it is now repaired, along with much new paint. The house is feeling like the top property it is again.

Food has become quite expensive here. We were shocked at the prices! A simple sandwich and coffee is well over the ten dollar mark. Lunch at the tourist restaurant on top of Mount Coot-Tha for the four of us neared A$60! Even groceries for the month have been exorbitant.

Paul tells me that it is no longer reasonable to expect to rent a house here for a price which would cover a mortgage payment. That agrees with our experience. The combination of food prices and rental prices points to a real problem with the economy here. The weather is still beautiful, though!

We have had a wonderful time bush walking Mount Coot-Tha, Mount Warning and South Stradbroke Island. The Eumundi Markets are as good as always. Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and the Australia Zoo were big hits with the kids.

Brisbane remains a truly livable city, with its excellent bus service, walking trails and superb entertainment. It is a concern, though, that it may be becoming too expensive to live here.

Hello, Redland

After years of viewing RDF through the Kowari lens, I have finally moved on. I wrote my first Semantic Web application using Redland today.

Redland, by Dave Beckett, built and installed easily on my Mac Powerbook G4, but I had trouble getting the Java and Python language bindings to build. For the moment, I'm settling on the Perl and Ruby bindings, which is what I mostly use in any case.

The application, for those interested, was a small prototype showing how Semantic Web techniques could be used to foster requirements traceability in software engineering. I automatically generated software collaboration graphs from code, then laid documentation RDF alongside. I used a single SPARQL query to show when the requirements required re-validation. The idea could become an interesting Eclipse plug-in.

A Practitioner's View of Software Development

I've been asked to give a guest lecture tomorrow to the CSSE 3002 class (The Software Process) at the University of Queensland. The topic is "A practitioner's view of software development". Professor Dave Carrington wanted me to tell his software engineering students what they can expect in the real world and how to prepare for it.

The slides are available in PDF and PPT.

The End of an Age

Americans seem to treat our status as the world's most powerful country as given. Few recall that our ascendance to dominant superpower status occurred only after World War II. We squandered our good fortunes on a costly war in Vietnam, which resulted in President Nixon ceasing to back the US dollar with gold. That marked the first time in two millenia that the world did not have its most powerful currency backed by a scarce commodity. Instead, we moved it to being backed by simple goodwill.

Now, while our manufacturing has moved to China and the promised services boom has gone to India, we are squandering our remaining dollars on a costly war in Iraq. It should come as no surprise that the Euro countries now claim a larger economy and a more stable currency. Our days on top would seem to be numbered and we had better adjust our attitudes.

How long will it be before China catches up to the E.U. in total economic might? Less than a generation, that much is pretty certain. Then we will be at least number three.

Foriegn investments in US dollar bonds float our economy. They pay for our ballooning trade deficit and our overseas wars. What do you think will happen when those foriegn investors start to buy Euros instead? It is already starting to happen. We have less cash, less growth and less economic security than we think we have.

We used to claim the world's most populous city. New York is now number thirteen, behind Mumbai, Shaghai, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Moscow, Delhi, Karachi, Istanbul, Beijing, Mexico City, Jakarta and Tokyo. Don't know where all of those are? You'd better learn, and knowing at least one of their languages wouldn't hurt, either.

I don't know about you, but I am rearing my children to be prepared for a world that is not centered on America. Are you?

A Tale of Two American Ideas

A Tale of Two American Ideas


My country 'tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty (and big business)
Of thee I sing

This slight modification to the lyrics of America by Samuel F. Smith ruins the rhyme and the tune, but achieves greater accuracy. The United States has thrived on the confluence of the two grand ideas of capitalism and individual liberty throughout its history. We cannot accurately speak of one without acknowledging the impact of the other.

I like to anthropomorphize these ideas, as it aids the memory and fosters understanding. Please allow me to introduce to you two American heroes, Orville Redenbacher and Robert Heinlein.

Orville Redenbacher was famous for passing on his key to success in business, "Do one thing and do it better than anyone else." He set out to create the world's best popcorn by creating his own corn hybrid and ended up with the best selling popcorn brand in the U.S. Orville represents the power of focused greed, success by entrepreneurship and enterprising use of capitalist opportunities. Orville works the market.

Robert Heinlein was a disabled veteran of the U.S. Navy who became famous as a science fiction writer. He was a libertarian, a thoughtful man and one who believed in maximizing the growth of the individual. Heinlein is widely quoted on a range of topics, but the one I like to use to illustrate his core beliefs is this one:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

What a difference! Orville counseled specialization and Robert vehemently denigrated it. Could these two ever learn to live together?

They did, of course. Even in the days leading up to the American Revolution, it was easy to find both forces at work. Jefferson, student of the enlightenment, promoted the concept of individual liberty, including religious tolerance. Businessman Washington, it is rumored, promoted military resistance to Britain partly to avoid financial ruin. The British were blocking the Westward expansion upon which he bet heavily.

The interplay between commerce and philosophy built America and made it fundamentally different from our English-speaking friends. Without America's abundant natural resources and the mercantile mindset we borrowed from the Dutch at New York, the American economy would surely have failed to achieve world dominance. Our drive toward liberty also played a crucial role. England was determined to suppress troublesome American colonists by restricting economic growth, including Westward expansion. Canadians and Australians remained primary industry producers for the crown while America industrialized, a factor as important for their late arrival to economic success as their relative lack of resources.

Clearly, America the pastoralist could not have driven the railroad West to the Pacific Ocean. Orville's friends drove the railroad to the sea while Robert's sought to make a better life for their children and themselves. The West was settled because it was in the best interest of both Orville and Robert to go there. There was no stopping our heroes when their interests were aligned.

World War II provided America an opportunity to demonstrate the power of this alliance to the world. American industrial might out-produced all other players, while American servicemen fought totalitarianism on all fronts. Dictators were brought low and America became a global power in a few short years, all because Orville and Robert were fighting on the same team.

Most of American history may be seen as an interplay of these ideas. Which dominated? Which was suppressed? They have played off of one another, sometimes complimentary, sometimes in conflict. And that brings me to globalization.

Globalization makes Orville happy, nay, ecstatic. He can find cheaper labor to produce his products. Even factoring in additional transportation costs result in savings that he can apply directly to the bottom line. What does Robert get from globalization? As far as I can tell, globalization just makes Robert nervous.

The political storm recently unleashed by the intended purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) by Dubai Ports World, a multinational corporation owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, highlights the differences between Orville and Robert. Orville can't think of a reason to say "no". Robert can and the answer is "security".

In other words, Robert was happy to put up with globalization because he thought it didn't concern him. Now he is becoming aware that it does. National strategic interests, such as the manufacturing capability necessary to maintain the world's strongest military (once dictated by law to require U.S.-based sourcing) and the control of the country's borders, are now recognized to be in jeopardy. They have been for some time, of course. Robert just didn't notice until recently.

Orville can justify the operation of U.S. ports by foreign terminal operators because it is good business. It does not make for good security. As George Orwell pointed out so neatly in 1984, today's political ally often becomes tomorrow's enemy. Globalized business dependencies simply last longer than political alliances.

Robert has noticed the way in which we treat China as a trading partner instead of the largest single threat to U.S. interests worldwide. China's rising oil consumption and its territorial aspirations, coupled with our reliance on its manufacturing infrastructure may make bin Laden's Al Qaeda look like the mosquito it is. The Soviet Union, in contrast, was defeated by a policy of isolation, not an intimate tying of economies.

Perhaps Orville can justify our Chinese dependence by looking at the European model. After all, the first step toward the European Union was the European Coal and Steel Community, a way to grow the economies of post-War France and Germany without allowing either country to use their economic might to start another war. Surely, globalization will have a similar effect on U.S.-China relations? Sadly that is just not so.

European states have committed themselves to an "ever closer union", and have consistently, if slowly, given up sovereignty to do so. The U.S. and China rely on a laissez faire nearly-free market approach which does nothing to bind the warfighting abilities of the other. To think otherwise is naive in the extreme.

America's dependence on foreign oil is causing a similar split. Orville will adjust to market conditions. Robert feels exposed.

Robert's followers often come from the political right. And left. So do Orville's. The forces of capitalism and liberty cross party lines. They swing voters in the middle. When aligned, they can create the most powerful political, industrial and military juggernaut in the world. When they are opposed, they can rip our Congress and our foreign policy in two.

The solution to our current problem is simple. Let's get Orville and Robert on speaking terms. Fast. To do that, international business interests need to be tempered in the interests of national security and national security needs to be tempered in the interests of individual liberty.

An Opportunity for Mischief

Hmm. I spent a bit of time today attempting to find the URL for Dubai Ports World, the UAE government-owned company attempting to buy P&O. It was a bit hard to find because of all the news stories relating to it. In looking, I stumbled across the fact that dubaiportsworld.com is available.

Is anyone reading this with fewer scrupples than I? Perhaps a former employee of The Onion?

The real URL for Dubai Ports World is http://www.dpiterminals.com/.

Bernadette is Fine

Bernadette's nose (reported broken in an earlier post) is healing nicely following visits to an ENT and her chiropractor. Thanks to all who expressed condolences!