MOVED

If any of you are looking at the Blog, and there may be a few of you though empirical evidence does little to support that claim, you will find that the Difficult and Obscure blog has been moved. It is now at dando.dagrier.net.

DAG

New Podcast on Crowd Sourcing

I have just discovered, much to my surprise, that I am an expert on Crowd Sourcing. Who Knew? I have been asked to speak twice this fall on the subject. The first time is next week at a conference in London. It looks as if it is going to have a broad audience and hence, I am looking forward to it.

I've just completed a podcast of my talk. It is illustrated, as I have acquired new software. We will see how well it is received.

DAG

Wiki leaks and Mid-summer Podcast

A month had passed since the fourth. We seem to be on the downward slide of the BP leak, for which we can only be grateful. I've had a big pice of writing to complete since the night of the fireworks. It is a long essay on technology in the media. It proved to be harder than I anticipated. It took an extra three or four days beyond the time that I had budgeted. When I do a big piece, I have to struggle to keep all the ideas in consciousness as I work, which is not easy and makes me a slightly disagreeable person. However, at this point, I have a decent first draft completed. I will let it set and then return to it.

The big news of technology and media at the moment is the WIkileaks issue. At the moment, the material that they have been posting seems to be relatively minor but the protagonists are starting to raise the issues to a conflict over high principles. None of them has made a particularly good case for their point but first arguments are rarely the best. It is unfolding against the recent series in the Washington Post about the rise of the security state and the expansion of security clearances. It may be an important point in this discussion. We will see how event unfold.

I have posted a mid summer Podcast for you. Drop me a note when you have the chance.

DAG

4th of July

I am not that familiar with the songs from the band the Killers, which put me at a disadvantage last night. We were at a 4th of July Party where they were the principle entertainment. Their music clearly derives from the long seam of heavy metal with more than a few connections to the founding band of the MC5. At the same time, their lyrics, as best as I could hear, dealt with the more gentle forms of the male frustration that forms the principal themes of that genre.

A young mother was dancing near us. She clearly knew the music well and was enjoying herself. She her son, who was roughly 2 and a half, in her arms and swung him as she danced. He thought all the attention was a hoot and screamed with delight. Dad, who was probably a vet, appeared from time to time, to give his wife a hug and a reassuring smile.

The mother danced on and on. It appeared that this was her courting music, the sounds that reminded her of the time four or five years ago, when she and the young man in the crowd were developing their relationship and asking if there if they had the ability and interest to make a long term commitment. The sound was not the least intimate and the lyrics, as they occasionally burst out of the noise, dealt with ideas that shake the adolescent male: finding a place, trusting women, controlling the urges that permeate consciousness. But the music represented the time that they had met. They both had survived that time. Now that song spoke to them of accomplishment and progress.

I'm not sure that she would have better appreciated the evening if she had a fuller understanding of the song lyrics. We communicate some fundamental ideas by very simple means. By rhythm. By touch. By common experience. She danced and danced. Happy to be at the event. Pleased to share it with her son.

Bomb Scare

"No one seemed very much concerned about this world or the future, unless it might be the anarchists, and they only because they disliked the present." (education of Henry Adams, Chapter 23)

As you might expect, I would quote Henry Adams in a moment of trial. We had a bomb scare this morning. A suspicious package at 20th & F. The DC police cordoned a 9 block area and prevented us from entering 1957 E. Traffic in Foggy Bottom stopped. I spent much of the morning sitting in the quad exhausting the battery on my phone and answering email in that order. They ultimately blew up the package but they have yet to confirm that it was a bomb.

It is far to easy to say that the police over reacted, that they restricted activity when they needn't have done so. However, that is a first reaction and first reactions are more often too quick to achieve a full assessment. At best, I can judge that the weather was quite decent, that it was rather fun to answer email in the quad while all the students in the last CI paraded through the campus, that it was a good way to end the month of June.

The news has reported that the package was a suitcase that resembled a pipebomb. As today was the last CI, it might have been a suit case from some hapless freshman. It might also have been a suit case that was supposed to appear to be a pipebomb. In either case, it was pleasant day, one that was difficult to dislike. Even if you were an anarchist.

DAG

New on The Known World

Why do I teach if I can't use my students in my blog. I have two new postings on The Known World that may be of interest to you. One is about the long standing collision of the two David Alan Griers. The other is about a game that Mr. Chaeng taught me. You can find both at www.computer.org/theknownworld

Request for Assistance

Could I ask your assistance with a small project?

As many of you know, I am currently running for the office of First Vice President of the Computer Society. (I am currently Vice President of Publications which is an appointed position.)

I have created a webpage for my campaign. (SInce you have gone through many examples of politic rhetoric with me, you will see some familiar examples in it.)

Could I ask you all to look at it and tell me if there are any of the usual problems: broken links, missing words, podcasts that won't download and sentences that don't make sense. I would appreciate your assistance.

The site is: http://sites.google.com/site/dagrierieee/.

Thanks for your help.

DAG

Stapleton

As I you know, I am am intrigued with the invisible, with thoughts and concepts that shape our lives but are so fundamental that they are completely invisible.

This page week, I have been attending board meetings for the Computer Society in an "Executive Conference Center" outside of Denver. The center was a decent but not great hotel located in a land of strip malls and low industrial buildings. Many of the attendees complained that they were far from downtown and had none of the amenities that accompany such trips: a quaint shopping area, intriguing stores, good restaurants a famous golf course. Across the street was a massive strip mall, but a WalMart is not yet an intriguing store nor is a Long John SIlver's a decent seafood place.

No one stopped to ask the obvious question. "Why is this hotel in the middle of a strip mall?" It was too tempting to complain. The strange pattern of the roadway. The large patch of flat ground behind the mall. The collection of fuel tanks a block or two away. The tall tower easily seen from the rooms with southern exposure. We were at Stapleton Airport. Denver's old airport which was closed 15 years ago.

The terminal had been torn down. The runways converted to strip malls and subdivisions. The airport hotels, which are rarely institutions of the highest quality, had been converted into Executive Conference Centers. The price was good because the the original investment had been recouped when the building was an airport hotel. The place was not that nice for the same reason. It had once been an airport hotel. It took a careful eye to see the pattern. Apparently most eyes did not.

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I will be posting links to your blogs. If you have one that you would like posted, please let me know.
DAG

Marni Karlin's Blog

Marni is a well established member of our community. As a freshman, in a land now far away, she helped me organize a special course on artistic censorship with the Bush I Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. (A controversial figure, he was eventually fired by the Bush Chief of Staff.)

Marni has since gone to law school (University of Chicago but not with Obama) and now works for a Senate Committee. Along the way she attended Ecole Cordon Bleu and started a blog on food. I think you will find it intriguing and we hope that she starts making making new contributions again.

Thoughts About Oil

The failure of the recent attempt to cap the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and the resultant accusations of blame has led me to think about how presidents deal with disasters. I wanted to find something in the distant near past to compare and went searching for Lyndon Johnson's response to the 1967 fire in Apollo 1. The result was surprising. Johson's entire remarks, released by his office and never spoken, were:

"THREE valiant young men have given their lives in the Nation’s service. We mourn this great loss. Our hearts go out to their families." 27 January 1967.

It was never mentioned at a Presidential press conference, never appeared in a bigger presidential speech. A quick framework analysis suggests that we considered this aspect of the space program in context that was quite different from the one that we use for the shuttles. It is also a framework from the one that we use for oil production and protecting the environment. (Remember both the start of Earth Day and the 1973/79 oil shocks are still in the future.) If you want a fuller sense of how Johnson character you can read his speech to the wonders at one of the NASA facilities, which was given at the end of 1967. Again, a simple framework analysis will show that we have a very different view of the connection between the government and technology.

Anyone have pre-1967 example of a president taking responsibility for a natural disaster or technological failure?

I hope that you had a good weekend. I saw a couple of the Memorial Day events and got a bit too much sun, though not enough to do any real damage.

DAG

The Known World

I think that all of you know that I write a column for a professional magazine that is called "The Known World." The publisher has just released the blog to support the podcasts. It is at www.computer.org/theknownworld. You will find that it is much like the podcasts that you have heard in class.

DAG

Building the Community

You will see that I have added a new Gizmo on the right for other Blogs. I am very interesting in keeping a collection of your writings and comments. At the moment, it has one entry, that of Jake Melville. Melville is in South Korea at the moment teaching English. It is, of course, a tense time on the peninsula. We hope that peace prevails not only for his sake alone but for all the residents of the region. No one needs a conflict.

I have been reading your letters and blogs from near and far for many years. I appreciate them not because they are profound, as profundity is difficult to achieve, but because they are honest. After a few postings that are filled with the excitement of a new country or a new job, they tend to stall as you look for something important to say. After some interval, long or short, when you realize that importance is oversold, you start looking for what is interesting, what is engaging, what is the part of the world that lives in you. A Thanksgiving in Siberia. A baby in California. An Internship in DC that is pretending to be a job. A store in Brooklyn that is searching for a market. All of these are good stories and all are welcome here.

The Ceremonies of Email

I spent much of the weekend sitting in ceremonies and emailing. That seems to be the tradition of modern ceremonies. We go to the events to experience them with our friends, even if we are located in different parts of the venue. I published an essay about this phenomena two years ago. I suppose that the only change has been an increased demand on bandwidth. I noticed that on the big Sunday ceremony, emails sometimes required 20 minutes to leave the outbox.

Greetings & Graduation

It is graduation season, a time of celebration for students and a period of sheer bliss for parents, who revel in the realization that their parenting theories worked. I approach the season with mixed feelings, as I will not be teaching for a full year. I'm taking a year away from the classroom to write and do the sort of scholarship that professors do.

Yesterday, was the Elliott School ceremony. Instead of spending the evening milling on the second floor and practicing their networking skills, a small group of this years graduates gathered in my office and talked about words and speeches, Mozart arias and the Dave Matthews Band. Graduation is on Sunday. A new life begins on Monday. We will see how things unfold.

For those of you who never experienced the Mozart/Dave Matthews lecture, you can find an article about it here.

DAG