MishMash

Academic blogs again

James
R. Regan, linked by The
Shifted Librarian:

I uncovered an annotated list of weblogs (k-logs) that Jill Walker is collecting that are used by researchers and academics as a part of their research practice. There is another called Ph.D weblogs.net which is attempting to bring together PhD students’ weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, and have a blog about your research interests, you can register there.

There’s a CFD blog listed, and one in which two philosophers read and hold an ongoing public discussion of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

Stalinland

Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow) reports
that

Massine Productions GmbH hopes to recreate a 10,000-square metre (107,600 sq ft) replica of East Germany, complete with surly border guards, rigorous customs inspections, authentic East German mark notes, and restaurants with regulation bland East German food.

“The aim isn’t to make big joke out of East Germany,” said Susanne Reich, a spokeswoman for the company which is expected to invest several million euros on the project, slated for the southeastern Berlin district of Koepenick.

Yahoo is running the story.

Dave Winer moves to Harvard

Dave Winer has a Harvard
fellowship tells MSNBC. Harvard
are to provide everyone with a harvard.edu email address with a blog
at no cost, a process which appears to have started in the law sachool.

Is this the next step in the decay of academic publishing? Will big-name Universities in the States encouraging their staff and students to blog help build the sort of critical mass in which academic blogging communities can form? One to watch.

It’s amusing that in the entire article, MSNBC - which isn’t totally unfamiliar with the weblog concept - fails entirely to link to Dave Winer’s longstanding if now rather bizarrely named Scripting News blog never mind the Harvard Law School weblogs which Dave is already posting to.

USB hot cup

Gizmodo link to a USB-powered
cup. Not sure the idea of having a cup of water - boiling or
otherwise - mixed in with the tangle of USB cables on my desk.

Major Labour revolt in Iraq vote

• BBC
• Sky News
• Guardian
• The Times only have a breaking news item
• The Telegraph require a subscription
• FT
• The Independent has a list of quotes from MPs

The BBC has a list of Labour MPs who rebelled. Two Bristol constituencies (West - Valerie Davey - and North West - Doug Naysmith) but no sign of Jean Corston, Bristol East.

Of course, it wasn’t a defeat, but something of an embarrasment. I notice that the BBC quote Blair thus:

Earlier, Mr Blair tried to reassure MPs at prime minister’s questions, when he insisted Parliament would be able vote “many times” on the crisis if there was military action.

Such votes would come before war unless that would jeopardise the
safety of UK troops, he said.

This last snippet appears to me to be a back door, by which Blair can leave if he so desires, and renders the assurances empty.

Seneca

Trust Seneca to see only the negative:

“If one does not know to which port is sailing, no wind is favorable.”

(More Seneca quotes).

The Climbers

The year clatters away like loosened stones
To the valley floor, and we are still here
Clinging to the rock-face in the icy gale.
Still here.
We have none of the right equipment, tools,
Route-maps - they have taken them from us.

So be it. With chapped hands
And finger-nails torn, broken and bleeding
We reach for the next extrusion of firm rock
Or windblown root. These now are our maps,
Our equipment, our tools. From them we learn
The direction, detours, of our journey
And how to endure the icy gale.

From the icy gale we grow to know,
Too slowly perhaps, the warmth of the human heart.
From the journey we are coming to understand
The destination we thought we knew.
We are here still and the new year
Is as open and unknown to us as the sky.

Geoff Gillham, 20/12/96

Sent to me by Sam Easterby-Smith.

xml.com: XP and XML

Bear in mind that I’ve only played with a couple of XP practices, so
I’m no expert …

O’Reilly xml.com published an article on bringing eXtreme Programming and eXtensible
Markup Language together. While his argument that XP could do with
better tools is probably valid, I think he misses the point
somewhat. One of the critical points of XP is surely that it relies on
constant, human communication. This can be
approximated increasingly well using internet tools, and if you have
programming team which is necessarily geographically distributed then
perhaps a set of such tools tied together and optimised for XP would
help, but it will be a poor substitute for collocation.

Every bit of tooling makes a process less dynamic. The XP processes
are specifically designed to focus peoples minds on the process, to do
things right, without losing that flexibility. The biggest risk of
bringing XML into XP along with an XP IDE and so on is that it
converts XP into a rigid methodology.

Thomas Jefferson on freedom and security

Thomas
Jefferson 1743-1826.

“Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

Many variations of this quote can be found. Either Jefferson was prone
to repeating himself - which is likely, given how hard it can be to
impress such simple ideas upon people - or he is extensively
misquoted. I happen to prefer the formulation of this version to the
others.

Looking at the oft quoted Jefferson soundbites, he would appear to be
a pretty hard-line libertarian.

See more ...

O’Reilly interviews Eric Bonabeau on Swarm Intelligence

O’Reilly openp2p.com has an interview
with Eric Bonabeau on swarm intelligence.

The concepts of swarm intelligence and stigmergy are being
brought into play in the discussion about the emergent properties of
the world wide web, as utilised by the Google page rank algorithm.

Back to Bonabeau:

Solutions to problems are emergent rather than predefined and preprogrammed. The problem is that you don’t always know ahead of time what emergent solution will come out because emergent behavior is unpredictable.

Surely this leads to the need to apply a process of evolution over the
desirable emergent properties. It is the emergent property that is of
interest, but the exact impact of a small change in a swarm member’s
behaviour on the swarm’s behaviour cannot be predicted, the Genetic
Algorithm type approach becomes not only powerful but essential.

Better keep the agent of mutation/crossover of the swarm members in
the evolutionary process external. If you provide the swarm members
with their own reproductive ability you’ve created a new organism.