A tale of a fateful trip

Just sit right back
And you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip,
That started from this tropic port,
Aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty sailin' man,
The Skipper brave and sure,
Five passengers set sail that day,
For a three hour tour,
A three hour tour.

The weather started getting rough,
The tiny ship was tossed.
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The Minnow would be lost.
The Minnow would be lost.

The ship set ground on the shore
Of this uncharted desert isle
With Gilligan,
The Skipper too.
The millionaire
And his wife,
The movie star,
The professor and Mary Ann,
Here on Gilligan's Isle.

(Ending verse)

So this is the tale of our castaways,
They're here for a long long time.
They'll have to make the best of things,
It's an uphill climb.

The first mate and his Skipper too
Will do their very best,
To make the others comf'terble
In their tropic island nest.

No phone, no lights, no motor car,
Not a single luxury
Like Robinson Crusoe
It's primitive as can be.

So join us here each week my friends,
You're sure to get a smile,
From seven stranded castaways
Here on Gilligan's Isle!

---

I totally feel like Gilligan at the moment - no doubt about it.
My apocalypse is bleeding, mythologising the future when not applicable!

I have a tale to tell, not such a great tale, about what should have been a three hour journey into the world of cloud computing and servers on demand, which has turned into an epic journey of unwanted adventure after another.

In the episodes to come, a chiaroscuro of the nether-land of virtuality - of blind Sancho Panza in the land of unwritten and illiterate, searching for a Book of Kells and finding - used rolls.

About to go shopping

About to go shopping - more birthday presents

Information Attention and Herbet Simon

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- Herbert Simon
(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/herbertsim181919.html)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/09/where_attention.php
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2005/11/the_looming_att.html
http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/2005/11/the_looming_att.html
http://scientific-presentations.com/2009/10/10/learning-from-herbert-simon/
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/08/wealth-information-takes-attention-patient.html




Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
- Herbert Simon


Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
- Herbert Simon


In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.
- Herbert Simon


Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.
- Herbert Simon


The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
- Herbert Simon


The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.
- Herbert Simon


There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we're good people we use it for good purposes.
- Herbert Simon

Software Engineering Is Dead

There are a number of unanswered questions implicit in what DeMarco has written:

1. How does one actually choose the projects? How does one know that Project A will eventually cost $1million and deliver value of $1.1m versus Project B costing $1m and delivering $50m. What if both cost $1m and deliver value of only $500k each? What if both eventually end up costing $20m each and deliver value of $1.1m each? How many of the last type of projects could a company afford (a normal company - not a company like Google which earns so much from other sources that the cost of failed projects is almost irrelevant). Most organisations do not have unlimited funds, and so must somehow choose between projects. That choice is usually couched in economic terms (the cost of projects versus the benefit (ROI) of a project) but we all know that mostly the real decisions concerning projects are political (of one sort or another. So one could argue that the economics don't count - except that most of the "politics" has the economic impact as one criteria of the politic decision (people want to know the numbers - even if they ignore them!) and thus, the basis of actually knowing how much a project will cost BEFORE it starts needs to be considered. Once again, how does one do this?

2. The implication is that one should just do software until one decides to stop. When is a good time to stop? Once again, it appears that the implication is that one stops when the key decision maker(s) decides to do so - when the money runs out, or when there appears to be enough functionality to satisfice. Unfortunately, the second option requires serious understanding by the decision maker concerning the functionality and effectiveness of what has been produced (acapability not readily available in most organisations). And the first option may easily gazump the second. The money runs out with something that is barely useable, if at all. What then? Ask for more money? Typically yes, which leads to the next point.

3. If some software is needed strongly enough by an organisation, it usually ends up just keeping paying for it, month in, month out, regardless of the original estimates for costs. What starts out looking like a "standard" software engineering project (big plan up front, lots of process and control, big-end methodology, etc) turns into a never-ending "agile" project. Work continues unabated, withreleases popping out on a regular basis, based on the ability of a fixed team of developers to produce within that period, as prioritised by the business (if they are lucky) - and not based on any semblance of specific functionality planned for and controlled in a big-end development process. The afore-mentioned scenario occurs if the organisation is lucky. If it isn't, the software remains as is, under-delivering for the organisation until it is replaced by yet another attempt to get something useful for the organisation.

4. In all the available scenarios outlined above, the only real way of determining the usefulness for some software is after the fact, including determining the cost for the software and the value that it delivers. This does nothing to address the proper concerns of organisations in relation to managing expenditure and investment, and ensuring that the financial position of the organisation is managed and known in advance (particularly important for financial reporting for companies, especially public companies). This is also an important risk management issue for organisations.

5. Which brings one straight back to the question of reconciling the activity of "craftsmen" in a "managers" world - something which continues to be exceedingly difficult. Maybe this is the key question which really needs to be answered in relation to enterprise information systems.

Streams, Mirrors and Becoming

1) Internet = collective nervous system: OK
2) Web = collective brain: hmmm… the Web is an important part of the infrastructure of the global memory (collective brain is exagerated. It's only one of the first layers of it. Cyberspace is still in embryonic form)
3) Stream = global mind: definitely not. I understand the relation between the linearity or sequentiality of the digital stream and the linearity of the personal thought stream. But there is no “mind” without reflexivity or consciousness, and you know that. The “stream” has no reflexivity, it is not a mind, it is just the flow that will feed the future mind.
By the way, global reflexive collective intelligence needs full transparency. No global brain or global mind will be based on commercial secrets.

The reflexivity is already there – in the people themselves – who form a critical part of the Stream. The Stream is a cybernetic loop that includes people. Therefore it is effectively reflexively aware. Reflexive awareness will not come from software or machines or some kind of information, and it won't come from magical complexity either – it's already present, in us.

The global mind is a cognitive process, just like the human mind. The witness of the human mind is not “in” the mind, just as the witnesses of the collective mind (humans) are not “in” the Stream.

I agree with everything you just said, there is a misunderstanding here: I mean that there is still no “mirror” (or dynamic synthetic representation, if you want) of the global mind as such. Yes, as you say, the reflexivity will always be in the people, but the question is what is reflected? Any particular stream a is a very partial and tiny aspect of the global mind

I think about this question often too. We have several mini-mirrors already. For example, sites that reflect current trends – like Google Zeitgeist, or Technorati, or trending topics on Twitter, or services like Twitturl, Psyng, and others that map trends in real time. But those are partial views. Psyng is perhaps one of the most comprehensive, but still just a tiny slice. What would the comprehensive central mirror look like and do? Is it even possible or useful? Also – mirroring back to a user their own stream is possible, but no so useful perhaps – it seems that it would be more useful to see mirrors of others, or of large groups – views which might not be possible to know or see any other way…

I do think that mirroring back to the user (to oneself) is useful - provided that what is being mirrored back is the reflection of what one considered or planned to be the future (at a point in time) and that the mirroring happens in the “now”, when the planned future may or may not be about to bring itself into existence (to “become”, not just to “be”).

(the last paragraph is my comment)

Source: http://www.twine.com/item/128lzwnpc-5s/is-the-stream-the-next-new-metaphor - see the comments section. Paragraphs variously by Pierre Levy, Nova Spivack.