Thieving and Sneaky Administration

The US Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) has finally upset me. I've been giving them a lot of slack in recent years because I know it is hard to do what they do and harder still to do it within a huge bureaucracy. Recent events have caused me to reconsider my good behavior.

A couple of months ago I accidently left a tiny Leatherman Squirt on my key ring when I went to Dulles Airport near DC. It was my mistake and I fully expected it to be taken by security (even though the cutting blade is no larger than the file on a set of nail clippers and therefore no conceivable threat to anyone's life). I gave it to the TSA agent on the other side of the metal detector. He looked at it, smiled and put it into his own pocket. It was obvious that he intended to keep it.

Last week I flew to New York State for a meeting. I had my iPod in my only bag, which I carried on. On my way through airport security in Ithaca, a TSA agent told me that my bag would would need additional search. She searched it all right, and stole my iPod at the same time.

I understand that it is hard to find good, honest people to do a job like that. Maybe that should tell us something about the way we attempt to provide "security". Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Exposing Secret Army Research

My friend Chris sends this update from a super-secret R&D lab:

"As many of you know by now, the Army has adopted the Advanced Combat Uniform (ACU). The ACU is the most advanced digital camouflage uniform in the world. It is the result of millions of dollars and thousands of hours or research in the Army's newest, state of the art, camouflage testing facility. While the exact location of the facility is still secret, we can now reveal the first ever photograph from inside this facility."

GRDDLable Home Page

Now that GRDDL is a W3C Candidate Recommendation, it is high time to (finally!) have a machine-understandable home page! Mine now returns 49 embedded triples according to the online Redland parser.

Semantic Tagging in my Home

I was planning to blog (one day...) about my daughter's tagging of items in my house, but Weeble beat me to it.

Science and Religion: The Short Course

OK, here I go again. This one will generate some comments. I have finally figured out why science and religion (of any form) are natural enemies.

Science has determined that the universe is going to end eventually, either in a "Big Crunch" or in an ever expanding heat death. If I understand the current physics correctly (I do not, but may have a handle on the summaries), the odds seem to be in favor of an expanding universe piddling away the last of its energy in heat death. To summarize the findings of cosmology, there is nothing that we are going to do to stop that. Not on Earth, not in space, not in the future, no way, no how. We are along for the ride.

Even in the short term, science informs us that life on Earth could end abruptly from an asteroid, or via a passing star in some millions of years. Of course it will end eventually, upon the expansion of our sun past the orbit of our planet as part of its natural life cycle.

Science also informs us that we are driven to preen, to prepare, to want, to enjoy sex, purely for the reason that our ancestors survived better than their peers having those traits. Eat, survive, reproduce. That is all life has ever been about.

That view of the universe is less than uplifting for some readers.

Religion, on the other hand, asks us to believe in a mythology for the sakes of making ourselves feel better about the fate of the universe. The role of any mythology, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell again, is to put oneself in accord with the universe. That means to weather the fears of childhood and the hormonal storms of adolescence without self distruction and, at the other end of life, to accept death gracefully. How are we supposed to do those things, ask believers, when science tells us that life is ultimately meaningless?

I propose a new meme for the new century. Let's see the beauty of the universe for what it is. It really is an incredible place. Let's revel in it, for it is what it is and we, small and fragile, are who we are. We may try to change who or even what we are with our science, but we cannot finally escape the heat death of the universe itself. We are still along for the ride. We might as well care for each other. We might as well take care of our planet. We might as well make a heaven for ourselves, right here and right now, than to live in a hell of our own making.

Can science point us to a new morality? People have tried before and eugenics was the result. "Social Darwinism" was engendered by a scientific viewpoint, right? Yes, but I think we can do better this time. We can think the problem through, iterating the meme as we see fit. Consider some morality that might flow from scientific thought:

• If our lives are ultimately meaningless, shouldn't we watch after our own happiness while we are here? We should get to work on a culture of gardening; we have a lot of work to do to make Earth a nice place.
• If no gods are going to save us, should we not consider saving ourselves? Waiting for the Rapture should no longer be an excuse for inaction.
• If we recognize ourselves for what we really are, could we find a way to stop being ruled by greedy, power-hungry nutters? Perhaps the reason so many senior executives, politicians and religious leaders fail to live by their own standards is that it takes a badly broken person to want those jobs to begin with. They deserve our pity and our help.

Religion and science are natural enemies because they differ on the meaning of life. The success of science in predicting and explaining the workings of our universe suggest that we should start work on a means of answering those questions traditionally left to religion. How do we learn to accept our fate? How do we learn to enjoy the ride? It can be done. It is, after all, a very lovely universe to die in.

Tucana/Kowari/Mulgara Podcast

Paul Miller of Talis interviewed me yesterday for a podcast about Mulgara. We covered the history, present and immediate future of Mulgara and its predecessors, Tucana and Kowari.

Breaking CFLs

Compact Flourescent Lamps or CTLs have been hailed as a wonderful new way to save energy and they are. Even though they do contain some significant pollutents they have less than power plants would create to make up for the energy saved. CTLs are a no brainer, right?

Better think some more. A friend IM'd me today to discuss an interesting conundrum. He has a young child who, in a fit of pique, kicked a CTL in his bedroom lamp and broke it. The roughly 4 mg of powered mercury are now embedded in the carpet, the bedding, the curtains, the boy...

It is legal in the US to dispose of CTLs in regular trash. Naturally, this results in a lot of mercury contamination landfills. Consumer guidance has focused on this issue; how and where to dispose of them properly. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any guidance on avoiding them in the bedrooms and play areas frequented by young and rambuctious children.

Are We Too Safe?

My father grew up during the depression, on a subsistence farm. His family lost two young children from illness. Adults regularly failed to live to old age. As my mom said, "If you got sick, you probably died." Those were the days before antibiotics, before antivirals, before cancer cures. Food was scarce, jobs were scarce and life was hard.

My father recently made the interesting observation that people of his era are not as scared - of everything - as younger generations are. His generation is not scared to live for fear of dying. He specifically mentioned worries about optimizing diet and exercise and extreme fears for children. Why shouldn't little Johnny climb that tall tree or run in the road? Sure, he might fall or get nailed by a car. It happens. It is an interesting attitude.

Those of us who expect, really expect, to live to be one hundred years old, and to be free of pain, mobile and healthy the entire time, have a different outlook. We do worry about our safety. We do feel a need to take care of ourselves. We increase the investment that we make in our bodies because we expect to rely on that investment later. What price do we pay for that expectation?

I never saw a wild thing
Sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead
From a bough
Without ever having felt sorry for itself.
— D. H. Lawrence

Awesome Aussie Send-Up

David Morgan-Mar, the twisted genius behind Irregular Web Comic, has done it again. He has a pearler of a podcast from back of Bourke. There is an accompanying transcript here for you cyberbludgers out there.

Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web

THe W3C has started a new "incubator" activitity to look at Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web. This could be interesting, since it is one of the few activities that I have seen that explicitly addresses the open world nature of the Semantic Web. I'll be watching this one.

Working on a New Book: REST in Java

I am pleased to announce that Brian Sletten and I will be writing a new book entitled REST in Java. It will be published by The Pragmatic Programmers. We have not yet set a delivery date for the manuscript.

The book will cover the creation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) using the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. I believe that this will be a fun and exciting project.

Tales from an Afghani Winter

My friend Chris, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, is currently serving in Afghanistan. He sent me email describing the situation there shortly after Vice President Cheney was targeted by a suicide bomber. It certainly sounds every bit as dangerous as we hear in the press, in spite of comments to the contrary. The bomb killed about 20 people.

"We've been getting lots of press due to the Vice President's visit and the suicide bomber.  Nobody covered the rocket strike last week.  My office actually looks toward the gate the suicide bomber hit yesterday.  There are many layers of security and blast walls etc, I was never in any danger.  I sit in a safe building looking at computer screens most days.  You do however, get good at the sounds of explosions here.  When our planes drop bombs it is a hollow woomp, then when EOD teams blow-up captured explosives, IEDs, etc., it is a muffled boom because they usually place the items in a disposal pit, but when you hear a sharp crack like yesterday you know it isn't good.  When I looked out my window and saw the local villagers running toward the gate I knew it wasn't the usual odd mortar or rocket.  We had a memorial for the victims early this morning before the coffins were taken to the plane.  The US soldier was from the unit in the same building as my office is in."

Andrae Muys, Randall Swartz and Me

Andrae just pointed me toward a nice photo on Flikr from December 2006 at the Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne, Australia. It was taken of Andrae Muys of Mulgara, Randall Swartz of Perl fame and me (left to right) in the Caulfield train station.

Replacing Text in HTML Tables

One of my students asked me how to replace text in an HTML table when links were clicked. I thought it was a useful technique once we worked it out, so here it is.

The code:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function fillTable(value)
{

var stuff_a = "This is some stuff.";
var stuff_b = "This is some <b>other</b> stuff.";
var content = document.getElementById('content');

if (value == 'a') {var stuff = stuff_a;}
if (value == 'b') {var stuff = stuff_b;}

content.innerHTML=stuff;
}
//-->
</script>

<table border="1">
<tr>
<td><a href="javascript:fillTable('a')">Choose me!</a></td>
<td rowspan="2"><div id="content">Default content.</div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="javascript:fillTable('b')">or me.</a></td>
</tr>
</table>

Unfortunately, Blogger won't let me insert Javascript so I can't show a running example on this site :P

Honesty and Trust

I was recently involved (peripherally) with a business partnership that broke up. The partners did not see eye-to-eye. Their lack of synchronization was not immediately apparent, but it became more so with time. Six months into their venture, they decided to part ways. That got me thinking about honesty, trust and models for those social dynamics. Specifically, I seem to recall that a natural clustering occurs between social entities that act honestly versus those who don't. Naturally, I hit the Web looking for answers.

It turns out to have been the great economist Adam Smith who observed that market interactions lead to "bourgeois social virtues" like honesty. Go figure. The quote is not from Smith (he did not use words like "bourgeois") but from Francis Fukuyama, whose paper at the IMF is referenced below.

Social models of trust seem to be based on incentives and costs (economic models). That approach has worked to a degree, although most economists will readily admit that it doesn't explain significant types of human behavior (e.g. Open Source Software). Not surprisingly, much of the academic literature focuses on either (a) describing trust systems based on costs and incentives or (b) suggesting incentives to make participants in a system more honest.

In the literature of evolution, there are many well-known examples of deception such as hidden ovulation in human women (unlike most other mammals) and uncertainty relating to paternity. There are strong reasons for such deception and so the ability to deceive is actually encoded in our genes! That sheds an interesting light on our social norms, doesn't it? I have come to think of social norms for honesty arising from incentives and costs, but being continued and expanded as a meme - an idea package in a Dawkinsian sense that takes on a life of its own.

There is an interesting paper on "social capital" (of which trust is an effect) and civil societies at the International Monetary Fund. It contains some useful definitions and references:

In anthropology, studies of the great apes have shown that their systems of behavior are similar to ours, but simpler. That provides a nice avenue for study. Rebecca Frank's work at UCLA made sense to me. She discusses social interactions of baboons, where coordination is valued to attain group goals so repeated deceptions become "unprofitable".

Come to think of it, I think I saw that kind of behavior on Animal Planet's Meerkat Manor show. One of the meerkats (Tosca, I think) was tossed out of the group for bearing young when she was not the dominate female. That was an unacceptable social interaction for which she was punished.

There are papers that demonstrate clustering of honest and dishonest people, such as Spatial Structure and the Evolution of Honest Cost-Free Signalling by Krakauer and Pagel. Interestingly, they suggest that islands of honesty can evolve even in situations where there is no cost and a net reward for deception.

"Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us"

Professor Ernie Ackermann sent me a link to an excellent YouTube video today on Web 2.0. Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, created it. Check it out. I plan to show this to my class, The Internet: Technology, Information and Issues. The video covers many of the ideas that we have discussed, including hyperlinking, the separation of content from presentation (HTML -> XML), standards, blogs, social interactions, the creation of the world's hive mind. Way cool and very nice work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Summary Data for the 2006 Software Engineering Practices Survey

I have published some summary data for the 2006 Software Engineering Practices Survey. A journal article should follow shortly.

Broken Culture

I have commented before about the prevailing culture of extra-marital affairs prevalent in the military. Today's news brought an extreme example. NASA Astronaut and Navy captain Lisa Nowak, married with three children, became embroiled in a love triangle with another astronaut and an Air Force officer. She is now charged with attempted first-degree murder and other lesser offenses. Holy smoke. Learn to keep your pants on, people.

Fiber-to-the-Home in Brisbane

The Queensland, Australia state government has announced Project Vista to bring fiber to homes and businesses in Brisbane. Later they say they will provide it to a greater area of Southeast Queensland.

It will be interesting to see what they do without a "last mile" problem. They are asking academics in the region to suggest content and services to utilize all that bandwidth. Being Queensland, they naturally list gaming as a possible advantage.

Businesses are slated to get fiber as well as homes. That is a big change from the cable rollout, which paradoxically left businesses out. The possibilities for Voice Over IP for all local calls is interesting. Combine that with Metropolitan Wide Area Networks and watch the telcos scream!

I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft sues them over the name?

Pushing Expose

How far can you push Mac OS X's Expose?

I was inspired to find out after being pointed to this image of some hundreds of Apple Mail windows in Expose.

The image below was done on a PowerMac Quad G5 with 4 GB of RAM. There are about 1000 windows (600+ email messages, roughly 300 Finder windows, 4 iChat windows, 1 Safari and 1 iCal). I originally tried to open 1079 mail messages, but Mail crashed. Perhaps a 1024 limit in Mac Mail?

Expose took about five minutes to render, but the return to the Desktop was almost instantaneous. Expose is apparently not cached, because going back to it without touching windows caused another long redraw.