Tag: interview

Alien Religions

Aliens on dark worlds might develop a very keen sense of temperature and use this for both communication and exploring their environment. While humans can sense gross changes in temperature, some animals on Earth posses thermal sensors far finer than ours. For example, the mosquito can register differences of as little as one 5-hundredths of a degree centigrade at a distance of 1 centimeter. Some fish such as the sole respond to temperature changes in the water of as little as 0.03 degrees Centigrade. The bedbug can crawl along a wall of a bedroom, sense a tiny area of exposed skin, and jump to it.
Humans sense relative temperatures. We know that one glass of tea is hotter than another. But we can’t tell precisely how hot it is. Other creatures on Earth sense absolute temperature. For example, some fish can be trained to recognize a particular temperature within 1 degree of accuracy irrespective of whether the fish came out of a previously warmer or colder environment. Some birds have the ability to maintain their nests at a precise temperature and make small alterations to the nest if it becomes a degree too hot or cold.

lots of wonderfully wacky ideas

Heliocentric Pantheon

BLDGBLOG: I’d like to start with your research into the Pantheon – in particular, how that building’s structure may have influenced the astronomical theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?

Walter Murch: Well, the Pantheon still holds its mysteries: Who designed it? How was it used? What does it mean? But Copernicus still has his mysteries, too: Why did someone like him, a high official in the Church, 500 years ago, dedicate his life to the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun? Not only did this contradict common-sense and the teaching of the Bible, but it also capsized 1400 years of Ptolemaic, geocentric astronomy. And Ptolemy, it turns out, was writing his classic book on astronomy – the Almagest – while the Pantheon was being built.

Scholars in the Renaissance were only able to learn about Aristarchus through a book called The Sand Reckoner, by Archimedes, where Aristarchus’s theory is described – but it’s used as the premise for an impossibly large universe. Aristarchus’s heliocentrism is almost certainly the source of Copernicus’s inspiration – but why did Copernicus take it seriously when no one else did?

In 1500, Copernicus took time off from his studies in Bologna and he moved to Rome. This is where the Pantheon comes in. Circumstantial evidence would suggest that if you were a young man of 27, footloose in Rome, the Pantheon would be high on your list of places to visit: it was probably the most famous building in the world at that time – the only intact structure from Ancient Rome – and it featured the world’s largest dome: 43m in diameter. It remains, to this day, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the history of architecture.

The Pantheon had survived mainly because it was consecrated in 609, yet the overwhelming feeling when you walk into that building is of a series of concentric circles surrounding a single bright source of light – which is the oculus in the center of the dome. It’s pretty certain that the Pantheon was designed by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and Hadrian was a Mithraist – a worshipper of the Sun.

The only writing about the Pantheon from around the time it was built appears in the History of Rome, by Dio Cassius. Dio Cassius mentions that some people believed the name Pantheon (which is Greek for all gods) came from the statues of the many different gods which decorated the building, “but my own opinion of the name is that, because of its vaulted roof, it resembles the heavens.”

That powerful image of the central source of sunlight surrounded by a series of concentric circles must have been an overwhelming experience for Copernicus, primed by his knowledge of Aristarchus. He would have been standing in a church (St. Mary All Martyrs) built 1400 years earlier as a pagan temple, looking up at Aristarchus’s theory “in the flesh” so to speak.

numerology, history, audio design, this interview has it all

content wire interview

i recently did a new interview with paolo di maio of content wire.

Gregor J Rothfuss has been observing and working with content management tools for many years. We catch up with him over the internet to talk about open source, a subject increasingly recurring

How do you see the business model for OS developing?
In services, more and more. there are some excellent open source venture blogs that track this question in great detail: Open Source Strategies and Asay

Os tools are not very usable. Why is that? Is it just still too early in their evolution?
This held true, traditionally, but has recently been true less and less. One reason is that software per se is no longer interesting, and increasingly, developers are aware of usability issues, and a nice UI can now be considered quite sexy. This is mostly due to some well-publicized web applications that utilize AJAX technologies. At first, OSS was often in catch-up mode and had to quickly fill in holes in functionality. now that functional parity to commercial products is being reached, the focus has often shifted to these more subtle qualities.

Plus, more and more hackers understand the value of design, as exemplified by Apple who are taking geek toys and slapping nice UI on top, or Firefox, which is essentially a slimmed down Mozilla.

Only in its Firefox incarnation has full success come.

Obsession

NYT writer katie hafner interviewed me about my blogging habits. the article doesn’t say, but it is talking about a period in early 2001 when i was very bored at KPMG..

The constant search for bloggable moments is what led Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, started a blog that focused on technical topics.
“I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I deemed interesting. Sort of creating a digital alter ego. The obsession came from trying to capture as much as possible of the good stuff in my head in as high fidelity as possible.”
For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home, late into the night, day in and day out until it all became a blur – all the while knowing, he added, “that no one was necessarily reading it, except for myself.”
When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise, he began devoting half a day every day and much of the weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging.
He was saved from the rut of his online chronicle when he traveled to Asia. The blog became more of a travelogue. Then Mr. Rothfuss switched jobs, finding one he enjoyed, and his blogging grew more moderate.
He still has the blog, but posts to it just twice a week, he said, “as opposed to twice an hour.” He feels healthier now. “It’s part of what I do now, it’s not what I do”.

EAI

i’m being interviewed by open enterprise trends about my recent piece on advogato.

1. What “lesson learned” about getting different open Source projects to work together did you learn from SlideML?
– micro steps are preferable to lofty goals that you never reach anyway
– the same technical issues pops up in different environments, you just need to find a common language to recognize that you are sitting in the same boat

2. What are the “hazards” a developer team should be aware of when they begin to introduce Open Source into a commercial enterprise? (For instance, with commercial software, the conclusion is almost ALWAYS that the software from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and others WILL work together — even if they have to spend millions with a professional integration services firm to do it).

not all open source software has a sufficiently large community to support its further development. becoming a respected open source citizen takes some work, but is crucial for organizations if they ever want to roll back their modifications into the main line of development. getting support is also much easier if a community respects you. this usually means organizations have to adopt a humble approach towards open source communities. ibm was not welcomed to apache by virtue of its brand, but rather each ibm employee had to prove his worth by valuable contributions. given enough resources, open source software of course integrates even better than proprietary software because all pieces can be molded as needed. for practical purposes it makes much more sense to look out for standards support (see below)

3. You mention a key lesson learned from CMSML: [From your article “Lesson: Don’t be afraid of the proprietary world, and seek collaboration for open standards with it wherever possible.”] Can we drill down on that idea a bit? How would you suggest an Open Source and/or commercial developer team “seek” such collaboration? Would you suggest how to do that, for instance, when working with Apache/Tomcat. PHP or MySQL?

there are many areas (file formats, internet standards, naming conventions) that are the low-hanging fruit for both sides. if you observe the blog ecosystem you will notice that individuals from competing firms nevertheless collaborate on technical issues and share implementation experiences. (sam ruby (ibm) links to don box (microsoft) and so on) let the individuals touch base. engineers can relate to each other, never mind the politics of open vs closed. that’s how we did it.

4. What’s your take on the emergence of “open standards” for commercial products, such as C#, JBoss for instance? Does this “middle ground” present something that open Source developers should be in favor of, rather than against?

absolutely. open standards are crucial. applied correctly, they enable the emergence of vast software ecosystems. the emergence of the internet both wouldn’t have been possible without, and greatly promoted the value of open standards. open standards are not really a middle ground. i view them as somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether the source is open or not. there are open source programs with undocumented file formats that are in essence no better than any proprietary program because it is just not cost-effective to glean the format from the source code. the oft-heard argument that because you can reverse-engineer a format with the help of the source code, that software is “open” is fallacious.
for all practical purposes, organizations do not have the resources to undertake that effort, and they thus are not really able to hedge against closed formats by picking open source programs.

Communities & Commerce

I agreed to an interview with George Dafermos. I will answer the questions over the next several days.

It has been suggested that the process/technology of weblogs and collaborative filtering can be deployed for commercial purposes with a striking success. Most typical example is Amazon.com but others extend this line of argument to include websites/online communities such as slashdot.org since so many commercial products and services are discussed within the /. community every single day and we shouldn’t neglect the fact that the most efficient form of marketing is “word-of-mouth”. Essentially, the argument for personalization and mass customization systems on the Net suggests that the process of weblogs/social navigation/collaborative filtering will increase demand and stimulate impulse buying. Some people claim that such systems effectively restrain our ability to explore (limit our choices and eventually lead to a personal straitjacket – the apotheosis of shallow individual consumerism) whereas others point that the “community” on which these processes / technologies are dependent upon in order to blossom will ensure that our ability to explore enhances since there is always a certain degree of diversity among community members and thus, this is a process of cross-fertilization among ideas, opinions, market-customer needs/wants and commercial offerings. What is your opinion regarding the commercial (direct or indirect, forced top-down or emergent bottom-up) potential of such community processes/technologies?

Weblogs are the next step in transparency. Information about products, persons and causes is spreading ever faster, and weblogs allow clued-in individuals to contribute to the debate. The direct potential of weblogs / community filtering is that companies will increasingly find it valuable to talk to their customers with weblogs. This is a rather obvious consequence and has already begun. More indirectly, weblogs will greatly enhance the brand of me, or the extended resume. This leads to more interesting job offers, consulting gigs. Lastly, blogs will never work top-down, because most people suck at writing, and if they are mandated, the fun and intellectual curiosity is very likely gone.

In addition, what do you feel about the promise of e-CRM and personalization on the Net? Personalization technologies (or processes) such as collaborative filtering are the way forward and companies that deploy (most cited example is Amazon.com) them will reap substantial benefits. Last year I read in the Economist (UK) that ‘companies now also have the tools to exploit what they know about their existing customers’ Companies are starting to realize that they cannot offer the same quality of service to everyone. They know that the true promise of customer data is to help them to discriminate, in service quality and perhaps in price, and to target their services so that they give priority to the most profitable folk on their books. The way I see it, as far as the online community model and personalization dogma are concerned (sometimes they were one thing such as in the case of My Yahoo!), the rise of e-CRM is based on appreciating cross and up – selling opportunities and differentiating on price and service…what do you think? Should I also add targeted marketing and product/service customization to the above? Is e-CRM just a passing fad or we are simply witnessing the early stages of a wider revolution in commercial practices and is the “commercial online community” a step closer to real “personalization”?

I think the degree of personalization really depends on the product or service being offered. For some of them, personalization might mean that the offering itself is customized (levis jeans), while for other products the customer interaction is the part being personalized. Well-informed customers (and you can pretty much assume customers will be well-informed in the future) will take issue with differential pricing.

Great care has to be taken with differential pricing online as was shown when Amazon started offering lower prices to first time buyers. Word of this practice quickly spread and Amazon had to withdraw this approach

It appears to me that customers will increasingly place trust in recommendations by fellow customers, and will not heed the eCRM activities of vendors (unless these vendors adopt the language and tools of the community, and fit in). eCRM is a fad that brought us the horrors of call centers. The next step will be that a real conversation between employees (finally authorized to speak on behalf of their companies) and customers starts, and customers will begin to trust not anonymous companies, but rather the persons they interact with at these companies.

The business logic behind commerce-oriented online communities is that they most efficiently integrate communication, entertainment, interest and of course commerce. Therefore, for the sake of convenience and/or because shopping is a social activity for many or/and because we as consumers want to realize our collective power and form online communities in order to help fellow consumers that share our interests (ie. buying scifi books or Dylan records or whatever) and then some day even aggregate our purchasing power to get better deals, and so on. In your opinion, is the online community a viable business model? And do we really want to deal with other people when buying staff online? Philip Kaplan (or Pud of fuckedcompany.com) argues that we shop online in order to evade the social activity that shopping many times is. Is the mantra “online social interaction helps bring profits” just a myth?

It is a myth if it is assumed that people will mingle on some dull shopping portal. They won’t. companies cannot force communities to evolve in the near term, all they can do is to offer enough interesting material and access to the minds behind the firewall to help communities grow. The impact of a specific community on sales and profits is very unlikely to be directly attributable. I’m a fickle buyer, for instance, and will google intensely before I make a purchase (which usually reveals the pros & cons of a product quite nicely). Those google hits were likely produced by some sort of community, but not necessarily the one a company had in its crosshairs.

We witness so many companies that boast their being a community (ironically most of the times it means adding a mailing list or chat to a website) while “community” admittedly serves as a catchphrase to lure advertisers to a website. Even efforts that were backed by visionaries of the Rheingold/Electric Minds type failed to become economically sustainable.
And there are so many accounts on why community and commerce are incompatible. Some refer to Geocities, other point to AOL’s community leaders program that backfired…so many stories (on the other hand, there are so many papers which say the opposite). Do you think that online communities and commercial practices are a bad fit, an ill-fated attempt to capitalize on the Net’s ability to enhance our social reach and enrich our communication space and relationships?

As I outlined before, closed communities around a brand or a vendor are destined to fail. The net is much too volatile, and its members too suspicious to make it work. Communities are increasingly nomadic as the cost of expressing oneself, finding like-minded people, and forming social ties becomes negligible. Centrally hosted communities are a relict of a time when community technology was scarce, and expensive servers needed to bring people together. These days, people are far more likely to flock together at a moments notice in smart mobs. So yes, the community business models of old are doomed. But new ones emerge to take their place.

UPDATE
George rightly pointed out a fallacy with my smart mobs example. I’m not saying smart mobs is the future, I just wanted to take the speed at which they form as an example. (haven’t read the book either 🙂 And yeah, text messaging is boring 🙂

There are increasing signs that the demise of the advertising – based revenue model (especially as far as the portal-centric online community is concerned) is imminent. What in your view can provide an alternative sustainable revenue model? Subscriptions? Or something else?

There is no one-size-fits-all revenue model. It makes a large difference if your audience is cattle (passive, low income, not terribly smart individuals) or readers that are actually co-writers. If you have smart readers, open up a 2-way channel, and you will probably get much valuable advice to make it worth your while. In the context of a newspaper, you could segregate the audience into contributors (who get the content for free, but contribute in a measurable way) and consumers, who pay for content (targeted advertising, subscriptions etc). To really leverage contributions requires advances in content aggregation, annotation, trust models and proper crediting. Surely the semantic web can help? 🙂