Category Archives: Business

Stuff that Caught My Eye – Ouch!

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A snapshot of recent bits:

Video

So Called “War on Christmas” Persecution

To this strawman viral post:

“We can’t say Merry Christmas, now we have to say Happy Holidays? We can’t call it a Christmas tree, it’s now called a Holiday tree? Because it might offend someone? If you don’t like our “Customs” and it offends you so much then LEAVE!!! I will help you pack. They are called customs and we have our traditions. If you agree with this please post this as your status!! I AM A PROUD USA CITIZEN… MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!! Do you have what it takes to repost this?”

Response:

You can say Merry Christmas as much as you want. We just want you to be tolerant of those who prefer to say Happy Holidays or celebrate the season in a way different from the way you do. You can call it a Christmas tree too. You just need to be tolerant of those who prefer to have a secular Holiday tree, or perhaps a Menorah. If you don’t like living in the SECULAR America that the forefathers intended, LEAVE. I will help you pack. Perhaps you can move to a theocracy like Iran or a country with less government involvement like Somalia. I AM A PROUD AMERICAN CITIZEN. Happy holidays to all of you, no matter how you choose to celebrate the season! Do you have what it takes to repost? Happy Holidays Everyone!!!!

And They All Look Just the Same

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This one’s for Debbie, and you know why:

Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,

Where they all are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Support Democratic Candidates – Commit to Vote

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Don’t buy the right-wing propaganda! It’s become very clear what Republican – and Teabagger – candidates will do.

Vote Democratic!

Action Sponsored by: Organizing for America at Change.org.

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

In 2008, Americans in record numbers voted for change.

But the health insurance companies, the Wall Street banks, and the special interests are already eyeing this November’s elections as an opportunity to put their allies back in power. Many Republican candidates have openly promised to run on a platform to repeal health reform, and roll back the progress that President Obama has made so far.

It will be up to each of us to support President Obama and keep the country moving forward by working to support Democratic candidates.

Commit to do your part this election season by voting in 2010.

Argue Pros and Cons of Healthcare Legislation Here

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The actual dialogue that we should be having has been eclipsed by the pathologies of the American public.

This post is for arguing the pros and cons of the actual bill, ok?

Civil dialogue, only, please. Stick to topic and argue the actual bill!

Ready Jonathan? Ready Phil? Ready Michael? Anyone else that wants to join in?

Here is your forum. Make your case. See if you can be fair and adhere to the rules of civil dialogue. Maybe then some points could arise that are actually important to everyone.

Here’s how this specific conversation started on Facebook:

I posted this link:

Swastika painted at Georgia congressman’s office – Yahoo! News – Someone spray-painted a large swastika on a sign outside the office of a Georgia congressman who was involved in a contentious argument over health care at a recent community meeting.

And this comment:

“So, this is Georgia and I’m confused. Is this an accusation or a proclamation?”

Feedback from Friends

Michael: Atrocities of WWII aside, that really can’t ever be put aside… EVER.. I’m actually kinda’ impressed that they have both the direction and the tilt correct.. given the usual pool of suspects, anyway. Unlike the one who painted it onto the Plymouth Rock backward… and was caught..

Heidi:
There’s a disconnect for me though. Rush, Limbaugh, etc. have been comparing Obama/Democrats to the Nazis all week, without being aware of the resurgence of the KKK and those sorts of attitudes among their base? Unlikely. Maybe it’s just especially weird here, this week.

Michael:
meh… he’s a clown who’s paid to fill a time slot.. you’d think by now people would wise up against per-minute ideology.

Phil: Typical. The sub-moronic trailer trash who are being goaded and funded to trash the nigg… I mean, that esteemed gentleman of color who happens to be president, praise Jesus and may the man die slowly… lack any apparent form of irony, rationality, intellect or historical knowledge. They DO, however, appear to know how to use spray paint. I guess all those opposable thumbs aren’t totally going to waste!

Phil: PS: Just in case my meaning was not totally clear, I am NOT referring to Obama by any form of racial slur. I am reflecting a sad truth about those who are so vehemently opposed to anything and everything the man does. At heart, they’re just terrified of a colored president, and will believe – or do – anything to counter that apparently terrifying reality.

Jonathan: I’m one of those who dislike the President’s policy decisions. I couldn’t care less what color he is. His policies scare me. Most frightening is the clear difference between his public words, and his actions. In other realms, that would be called lying.

Phil: *sighs*

The “lying” here, Jonathan, is being done by Obama’s opponents. Thanks for being one more American taken in by the high-stakes con-game being run to keep us shackled to the insurance companies! You are buying the lies wholesale, and we’re all paying the bill. If you want to know the truth, READ THE DAMNED PLAN, not the utter fabrications about the plan being spread by Sarah Palin’s lackeys and masters. It’s called “lying,” all right, but Obama isn’t the one doing it.

Phil: And as for “frightened,” be frightened by the people who are starting riots and inciting hatred at town hall meetings. This was done before, Jonathan, using exactly the same playbook. Germany, 1933. Look it up, and see who’s REALLY playing Hitler now.

Jonathan:
Wow. Do you have your tinfoil hat on to block the mind control impulses from the evil republican-neo-cons? We do have that vast right-wing conspiracy including insurance companies…

On a serious note, I’ve only seen/read excerpts from the bill, and those sections are disturbing. How about I post some links to those sections which clearly contradict the Obama rhetoric about the bill? I won’t have time until tomorrow night though. Gotta do laundry.

Phil: Who needs tinfoil hats? All you need is half a brain. As for the “mind control,” it’s quite simple, really: lies, lies, and more lies, backed up by utter fabricated hysteria from Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and FOX News. Utter. Complete. Fabrications. No evil conspiracies necessary. Just the old Vladimir Lenin truism: “A lie told often enough … Read Morebecomes the truth.”

Regarding the insurance companies, please watch the interview with former Sigma executive Wendell Potter; in it, he tells Bill Moyers exactly what they do, why they do it, and how they get away with it… including a mention of the “third-party dirty work” that would be employed to stop health care reform attempts. See http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html

As for the proposed bill, see: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc111/h3200_ih.xml

Start from here – or start from your own concerns.

CIA Recruit Toy for 5 year olds?

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Is a CIA Recruit Training Kit toy really necessary? Really?

I was in a toy store picking up a few things for our son’s birthday tomorrow, and when I saw this, I just had to catch it on camera.

"True Heroes" CIA Recruit Training Set for Age 5+

Does anyone think that the CIA is all about playing infrared tag? This is what we’re telling our kids now?

(shaking head)

Speaking at SemTech

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I’ll be speaking at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose at 5:00 PM on Wednesday, June 17, 2009!

I'm Speaking at SemTech 2009

Messy Folksonomies: The Uses of Metanoise for Better Organizational Collaboration

This presentation will consider the uses of bottom-up, co-evolving folksonomies for better communication and collaboration across disciplinary lines.

For reasons of efficiency, semantic technologies often focus on terminological control. However, where several types of discourse exist within the same organization, a layer of bottom-up vocabulary provides a space for the change and difference that is always part of language. Language, like life, thrives on the border between order and chaos, and even the noisiest and most undifferentiated meta labels can serve a function.

Update 2-18: Actually, it looks like I’m not actually speaking after all. My proposal was accepted by the conference, but my support funding didn’t come through. Oh, well. Maybe next year.

Gantt Rant

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Ooooooo, I despise Gantt charts. I’m trying to figure out timelines and tasks and resources and milestones, and I just keep thinking that this is the most ridiculous use of anyone’s time. Especially mine.

I’ve updated Gantt Project on my computer, and it’s not very friendly at all. It’s not the fault of the programmers. I’m sure they are totally fantastic, and I can’t complain about having a groovy open-source program to do this stuff. I’m just not sold on the value of spending all this time to do something that seems so obvious. Just make a list, delegate some tasks, and get to work!

I don’t know all the random things that will start popping up, so I’ll actually have to spend time updating the thing, too. Maybe daily. Oh brother.

The whole thing is so subjective. How should I know how long this particular task is going to take? How should I know the percent complete?

So I have an end date. And a begin date. And some milestones that I know.

I guess the trick would be to figure out which tasks can go on simultaneously, and which tasks are dependent on other tasks. That gives me a certain amount of parallel processing. But if some of the resources – the subject matter experts – the doers – are tasked on multiple things, then they’re probably not going to be working on many things at the same time. And then – they have other things to do, too. That can become political, since then you have to get decisions on priority.

There is an implicit methodology, but I don’t yet grasp its ins and outs – and I’m fairly sure that I don’t entirely agree with some of the premises.

To be valuable, it seems as though there should be a master resource database where common tasks have historical data on how long it actually takes to complete. Most of these things could be templated and conceptually modeled with a different system. Then there would be some mediating functionality to enter in whatever bits of data that you know have to be added and the chart would then be produced automatically. The chart is just a a graphical output.

I don’t think in terms of charts. That’s not my “learning style.” To work with charting as a tool seems wasteful – you’re always reinventing everything. I guess a real project manager would have the internal knowledge-base to make better charts, but my estimations are bound to be off. Nevertheless – here is the drop-dead date for the project. And here is the drop-dead date for delivery of the chart.

This is more subjective than grading essays, but it pretends to be some sort of hard data.

Usually I’m invigorated by learning new things, but this doesn’t interest me at all. This is like word problems with trains – I want to banish them forever.

Bah. It’s not that I can’t do it. If I couldn’t do it, it would just be a matter of some research and/or training to remedy the problem.

No, it’s worse than that because I don’t want to do it. Doing things I don’t want to do is incredibly difficult for me. That sounds so childish, I know. We all do things we don’t want to do all the time. I’ve got to unjam this wall of resistance now. Otherwise, I’ll be up all night fighting it and I’ll make life unnecessarily harsh for myself. So I’ve got to trick myself into doing it instead of focusing on that dread in my stomach.

This brings me back to the days of writing my dissertation. Not to be TMI, but menstrual cramps are not helping the situation.

Maybe I’ll just chart out the tasks as a plain old list, where I can rearrange everything and figure out the task dependencies, and then just transfer that to the program as the last step. Some background music might help with that. I can be enjoying my last weekend day – and enjoying the fact that because I have to do this, I don’t have to do some other stuff that otherwise I would be doing – and make it as painfree as possible.

Sounds like a plan.

But…. ooooooooooh, I hate Gantt charts.

Buy John’s Book

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I have been seriously remiss in my intellectual (and wifely) support! I haven’t even urged you to buy, read, and comment on hubby’s book – The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (Bradford Books, MIT Press)!

Preview The Allure of Machinic Life at Google Books.

allurofmachinic

I’m a little annoyed about the title, since I preferred “The Lure of Machinic Life” to “The Allure of Machinic Life.” However, the absolutely wonderful bit on me me me in the acknowledgments almost makes up for it. The book cover is extra-special, too, because it features a suggestive artwork by our friend Joseph Nechvatal.

John Johnston

John Johnston

The book is a philosophically-minded constructive analysis that answers Heidegger’s critique of technology in subtle and completely unexpected ways. It builds on the understandings of such thinkers as Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Kittler, but it’s also a very original tour through areas of research that haven’t been connected or critiqued from this kind of perspective. It’s worth the read if only for the interpretive history of research on (and ideas about) artificial life.

I’m biased, but I’m also a pretty good critical reader – and this book is fantastic. I think it’s been mislabeled by the marketing people, so I’m afraid that it won’t be read – and that would really be a shame.

Review
“John Johnston is to be applauded for his engaging and eminently readable assessment of the new, interdisciplinary sciences aimed at designing and building complex, life-like, intelligent machines. Cybernetics, information theory, chaos theory, artificial life, autopoiesis, connectionism, embodied autonomous agents—it’s all here!”
—Mark Bedau, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Reed College, and Editor-in-Chief, Artificial Life

In The Allure of Machinic Life, John Johnston examines new forms of nascent life that emerge through technical interactions within human-constructed environments—”machinic life”—in the sciences of cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence. With the development of such research initiatives as the evolution of digital organisms, computer immune systems, artificial protocells, evolutionary robotics, and swarm systems, Johnston argues, machinic life has achieved a complexity and autonomy worthy of study in its own right.

Drawing on the publications of scientists as well as a range of work in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory, but always with the primary focus on the “objects at hand”—the machines, programs, and processes that constitute machinic life—Johnston shows how they come about, how they operate, and how they are already changing. This understanding is a necessary first step, he further argues, that must precede speculation about the meaning and cultural implications of these new forms of life.

Developing the concept of the “computational assemblage” (a machine and its associated discourse) as a framework to identify both resemblances and differences in form and function, Johnston offers a conceptual history of each of the three sciences. He considers the new theory of machines proposed by cybernetics from several perspectives, including Lacanian psychoanalysis and “machinic philosophy.” He examines the history of the new science of artificial life and its relation to theories of evolution, emergence, and complex adaptive systems (as illustrated by a series of experiments carried out on various software platforms). He describes the history of artificial intelligence as a series of unfolding conceptual conflicts—decodings and recodings—leading to a “new AI” that is strongly influenced by artificial life. Finally, in examining the role played by neuroscience in several contemporary research initiatives, he shows how further success in the building of intelligent machines will most likely result from progress in our understanding of how the human brain actually works.

Language is not only a virus (grin) but also an essential bit of the block of the discourse network that co-evolves with technological change and human action to give rise to the computational assemblage; or, machinic life is always already within you (and without you) but here are some of the details.

Now – go forth and buy many copies, and tell all thine friends (and thine enemies as well) to read and discuss.

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