October 21, 2005
Mapgate?
The New York Times reports on a missing map that's important in determining the use of land for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Now there's a new map but some say it's a bit different from the earlier map. The new map makes more land accessible. (PVL)
"People have asked me several times, 'Do you think someone took this intentionally?' " said Doug Vandegraft, the cartographer for the Fish and Wildlife Service who was the last known person to see the old map. "I hope to God not. So few people knew about it. I'm able to sleep at night because I don't think it was maliciously taken. I do think it was thrown out." (PVM)
Mr. Vandegraft said he had folded the map in half, cushioned within its foam-board backing, and put it behind the filing cabinet in the locked room for safekeeping. (PVN)
He said he was distraught when he learned of the loss. In its place in the original nook, he said, he found a new, folded piece of foam board similar to the old one - but with no map attached. (PVO)
Who throws out a map and replaces it with some foam board without intention? (PVP)
| bl
| Categories:
politics
October 19, 2005
Wiener, Grammar, Action and Me
I've been reading a biography of Norbert Wiener. The title is the ominous Dark Hero of the Information Age. I'm not that far in but it's been quite interesting thus far, despite the sometimes stilted writing. (PV9)
When he was ten (c. 1904) he wrote his first philosophical paper, described in the book as "a treatise on the incompleteness of all knowledge". His conclusion: "In fact all human knowledge is based on an approximation." (PVA)
Wiener went on to lay most of the foundations for information theory, stochastic processes, dealing with feedback in electronic systems; all based on probabilistic statistics. He rejected Bertrand Russell--one of his tutors and one of the authors of The Principia Mathematica--within a few months of meeting. Russell said there could be internal completeness, Wiener said there could not, and Gödel eventually proved Wiener correct. (PVB)
Wiener also happened to be a wildly depressed guy. When there was noise in his own personal information system or he was not getting good feedback, he was unable to produce his usually good work or generally interact well with his life. He experienced self doubt and confusion within that mirrored his belief that nothing was certain, anywhere or anywhen. (PVC)
To what extent did one pattern lead the other? Where was the balance in the symbiosis between the perception of self and perception of the outer world. Wiener's later work informs views of "it's all one big system". (PVD)
I resonate with some of what's going on here. My drive to create information resources that are accessible, referenceable and reusable is driven by a personal need to externalize noise in my own system so I can do (occasionally) good work and interact well with my life. I want to make stigmergic structures out in the environment that I and others can use as what amount to optimized external decision makers and information chunks. (PVE)
Simply tossing information out into the ether doesn't cut it. For the chunks to be useful they need to be transparent, transportable, composable and authentic (in the Heidegger sense). Transparent means you can see what the information is for or about. Transportable means that the information survives being moved out of its initial context (carries, creates or refers to its own context). Composable means that the information can be effectively reused inline with other information. (PVF)
To put it another way, the information is like Lego: it is a building block in a system whose grammar can be perceived. This block can go on this block in these numerous but constrained ways. (PVG)
Information, here, is one word for many things: exchanges of knowledge, perceptions, tools and processes. (PVH)
In many cases the perception of a grammar relies on expertise. In order for more than one actor to collaborate in an information system, they must share some level of experience in the domain and have shared language. If they do not already have or first build shared language they will waste their time arguing the grammar of the available blocks with little composition. Until there is shared language very little will get done. (PVI)
(See also Collaboration Requires Goals for related discussion.) (PVJ)
So if found in a situation where shared language is too incomplete (as it always must be somewhat incomplete, see above) what are the tools to make more? (PVK)
| bl
| Categories:
collaboration
October 08, 2005
Tearing down walls with Atom
For some time now Socialtext workspaces have been pushing out Atom feeds alongside RSS. In this past week for a not-so-little experiment I made a stab at enabling support for the Atom Publishing Protocol or Atom API. (PV0)
This turned out to be hugely liberating and more than a little confusing. Perhaps it is just the use of "atom" as the name of the standard--my google skills are taxed as I search for up to date and relevant information that is authoritative and consistent--but more likely it is that while the Atom format has made it to some level of doneness, the Atom protocol is not quite so mature. (PV1)
These troubles matter little and will be solved: Late last night when I was editing, creating and deleting pages within a Socialtext workspace with both Perl and Python test clients, scales were scraped from my eyes, walls fell down, and objects once distant on the horizon were brought into clear relief. Sure, there are lots of Weblog APIs, but none in my experience has the comfy feel had by Atom in the wild. Atom is complicated and you can feel it, but you can also feel that it could end up doing some fun stuff in a clean way that brings the web another step closer to being a big storehouse of knowledge reusable (not just usable) by anyone. (PV2)
Reusing knowledge is what drives my interest in the web. It's the force behind PurpleNumbers and TransClusion. Atom has that same feel and that feels good. We're moving away from a world where there's a there there to a world where there's a there everywhere. Content people can aggregate, edit and move around in pieces large and small, ready at hand when needed. Atom can do much more than edit a blog entry about your lunch and what the cat has done. I dream of granularly addressable atom editable chunks in the uniquely identified cloud. (PV3)
The implementation in Socialtext is far from done. It's not yet aware of Collections, I'm ignoring that whole SOAP problem for now, there are some issues with authentication (WSSE doesn't play well with some security models) and there's the simple fact that my brain failed to suck up all the details (such as changing mime types) of the hundreds of documents I read in the past week. (PV4)
Who is working on implementations of this stuff? Let's talk. I need some clients to test with. (PV8)
Here's a screen capture from Joe Gregorio's wxPython client that I doctored a bit (the client, not the picture, there were some problems with authentication and content elements) as evidence for the court. This is just after creating, then retrieving the "Atom Will Rule The Universe" page from a test Socialtext workspace. (PV5)
Thanks to Joe for all his work on Atom and his help getting the Python client going and thanks to Ben Trott and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa for XML::Atom. (PV7)
| bl
| Categories:
Atom
