Why learning stuff matters, part 103

I have always thought the British were totally awesome in WWII, standing up to ultimate evil. Even when the odds were against them, and they were on their own. I love stories of how they flipped the proverbial bird to the Nazis whenever possible.

In 1941, a Major Alexis Casdagli was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to a series of prison camps. He practiced needlepoint to pass the time; this piece he created in December 1941 looks innocent enough, indeed it looked so innocent that guards allowed him to hang it on the walls at all the camps he stayed in. However the piece contains two subversive messages coded into the borders, messages that if they had been discovered by guards would have put his life at risk.

So taking time to learn Morse Code can pay off...

Read the full story...or here...

What we observe, or what we believe we observe...

The pervasiveness of economic illiteracy never fails to amaze me. Seemingly opposite positions live within perfectly reasonable minds.   People readily combine contradictions with such certainty by way of substitution. Faced with a genuinely difficult question, they answer a different, easier question, then conflate the answer to their question with the answer to your question. 

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters, according to economist Bryan Caplan in his sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan directly challenges that view by asserting that voters are not simply ignorant but irrational, and that this is in fact predicted by economic theory. Voting is not like shopping - it is more like making use of a commons, because the costs of a "bad" vote are borne by the public at large, and the chance of an individual casting the deciding vote is tiny. Therefore, people will vote for what makes them feel good without bothering to find out whether it really is good - it simply doesn't matter.

Mid week roundup...

There's danger in green construction… http://www.usbuildingdigest.com/channels/daily-briefs/health-dangers-in-green-construction. Well, maybe.

I pretty much dislike CES, but anytime one can build robots to serve us, I am all for consumer electronics. MeeMo, bringing me my Rob Roy. NO! NO! Not the person, the drink!

A good point to consider -- the "Darwinian" nature of Facebook's privacy policies are adequate.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/21/facebook_irish_data_protection_commissioner_implement_best_practice_improvements/
Which kind of reminds me of this position -- there is no privacy on the internet anyway, so just deal with it.
http://allthingsd.com/20090216/you-have-zero-privacy-anyway-get-over-it-that-goes-double-on-social-networks/

Amber case on the Role of Technology - Robots are our friends

Amber Case raising an interesting thesis -- technology like social media serves to relieve the isolationism enhanced by the industrial revolution.

"Good technology should make you superhuman," claims Amber Case, a cyborg anthropologist. Cyborg anthropology is a way of understanding how we live as technosocially connected citizens in the modern era. Case explores questions like: How is human experience evolving with technology? What are the implications to privacy in the digital realm? and How does technology affects our humanity? (more here)

The rise of the machines may come about due to our inherent hubris, but Case suggests the positive aspects of the tools we've built, and she actively investigates the nature of our relationship with those tools. Case believes we all live in the future. "We're able to touch a button and hear something on the other side of the world. We're able to carry a community in our pockets as we walk down the street," she says. By using anthropological methods to study human behavior and discover how people work, play, share and communicate she's able to make better solutions for users for some of the largest companies.

New year, new challenges… #1

First in a series of thoughts this month on IT, Cloud, SOA, bicycling, well, just about whatever...
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The new year is underway, party hats are put away, the confetti as been swept up. Now is as good a time as any to tackle some big problems. And large data sets can be a challenge.

In the cloud, a plethora of new data stores are coming on line, but challenges remain on how to scale (to accommodate upwards of gigs of bits), and how to distribute -- to the right user. Some areas I recommend to my clients for consideration include:

How often is the data accessed? Is caching the right way to go for performance reasons, or is this transactional data, requiring frequent Create, Update or Delete actions? RESTful services that map the traditional WS* approach to GET, POST, and other HTTP actions might help with performance (and portability of code).

Perhaps there is one (or more) enterprise application currently utilizing that big data set. Operating across platforms, perhaps even networks, raising different challenges. Are your enterprise apps shunting computational processing off to the database? Is that hurting others' use? One hint: when you audit your business processes, is business logic captured as stored procedures?

Shorthand solutions often present the quickest wins — keep data near the end user, for example. With mobile platforms (iPhone or iPad clients, for example), perhaps storing a subset of data on the device, and synching, makes the most sense.

Whatever big data set challenges you face, the approach to crafting solutions may seem templates. but crucial architectural strategies are pretty much unique to the specific situation. A major change to tables, or the question of meta data, can involve architectural changes on a large scale. And the new year is a good time to plan major renovations…