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Found in the comments on a Philip Greenspun blog post:

An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues of digital divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.

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NYT Magazine is running an article by Clive Thompson that starts out by reporting on a study. The study finds that people lie less on the internet in spite of its image as a realm of dangerous strangers. I had a funny thought as I read this paragraph:

On the Internet, though, your words often come back to haunt you. The digital age is tough on its liars, as a seemingly endless parade of executives are learning to their chagrin. … This isn't a problem for only corporate barons. We all read the headlines; we know that in cyberspace our words never die, because machines don't forget. ''It's a cut-and-paste culture,'' as Hancock [the study's author] put it (though he told me that on the phone, so who knows? There's only a 63 percent chance he really meant it).

The parenthetical remark that ends this paragraph is a joke. (I mean that literally; it is a funny phrase intended to evoke levity.) It includes a playfully ironic jab at the author. My thought was: why didn't he put a smiley face there?

Oh yeah. This isn't a blog post (although the author writes a blog), it's an article in the friggin New York Times.

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A great article by Stephen Levy that follows up on and ties together lots of recent events in the land of Google.

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Lisa Williams, who got me thinking about how comments you make on other blogs ought to be findable from your own blog, has some more great ideas for technology-aided discussion. In particular, the location-aware commentary ("show me what others think about the restaurant I'm currently standing in front of") is a wonderful idea that can be solved or closely approximated by current technology. That's what I love about computer technology: there is such a strong current of innovation that you don't have to look far back to discover fundamental, amazing new ideas. I think it's partially a privilege of good timing— a kind of renaissance.

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This article about blogging quotes a few bloggers from the Berkshires, where beautiful (and better-than-Harvard) Williams College sits. It features Toph Cyll, who was a terrific colleague in Williams Students Online as well as a good friend.

"I'm fascinated by digital community," said Cyll. "I think that's sort of the heart of the phenomenon, it lets everyone mix and match. It's so organic that it's really redefining the ways we interact on the Internet."

I must confess I am immensely proud of what Toph and all of us in WSO have accomplished. It was a great privilege to work with that group— honest, important, fun, and rewarding hard work.

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Friedman has a short and sweet commentary on outsourcing. What it boils down to is this: America has a unique culture and infrastructure designed to facilitate innovation.

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.

This resonates encouragingly with some thoughts I wrote a few months ago under the heading A silver lining in the cloud of outsourcing. Though there are some major industry changes that will upset many people— including some I know personally and wish the best for— the end result will be to refine America's focus on innovation. The challenge to address is not just how do we make the short-term economic impact of offshoring less devastating, but how do we transition the labor forces to sustain and develop America's infrastructure for innovation?

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"Nietzche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now."

— Joseph Campbell

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Easily cache large media files for free at bandwidth hotspots around the internet! Wow!

A post by David Weinberger from the SXSW conference session on librarians got me thinking about the many roles of libraries. I think there may be a niche for a business in the library world: one that recognizes that people aren't really willing to physically go to libraries for information any more. It's now remarkably easy to get information online, and no claims of superior quality will change the perception that google is fast, easy, and good enough.

So why go to a library? Some reasons:

• there are people there you want to work with
• you can browse and skim a reputable collection by topic
• you can use resources that are bound to that place, such as librarians, annoyingly proprietary databases, or special media (microfilm, maps)
• it is a nice place to hang out and think about things at leisure away from the bustle of everyday life

What would a library more tightly focused on these goals need?

• a number of small, reservable, soundproofed conference rooms with chalkboards and internet access so that 2 to 4 people can have a discussion without disturbing others
• a cafe that serves coffee and snacks, to sustain long stretches of study and discussion as well as to provide a noisy, stimulating atmosphere for those who prefer it; and to function as a rendezvous point
• dedicated quiet reading/study areas where one can retire with a book or laptop and cup of coffee
• specialized browsing-oriented catalogs: librarians should focus on a hobby or interest of theirs and develop focused browsing systems in partnership with library patrons and experts in the field; these could be done on a rotating exhibit basis
• I'm going to harp on that last one a little; can you imagine how great it would be to go to the library to see an exhibit on the greatest information in an area of interest to you, curated by experts? Not only would you find new, stimulating material, but you'd also be guaranteed to bump into experts and other hobbyists
• The library would have to prominently feature (and even market) the reputation of its librarians and patrons, so like-minded people could find each other and would choose the library as a natural meeting spot
• The library must be located near businesses and restaurants so that it can be easily utilized for meetings and can be seen as the launching point for friendships, romance, and partnerships

And what's wrong with current libraries that prevents them from realizing these goals?

• They are overly focused on books. Books now contain a much smaller fraction of the world's useful information than they did when libraries were conceived, but the concept of a library's holdings hasn't kept in step.
• They are excessively tied to government or educational institutions. In theory, public libraries should serve the public, but as large government institutions they are inert, inflexible, and underfunded. University libraries exclude many potential patrons and will never have their primary focus on the public, and suffer from many of the same problems as public libraries on top of that.
• Because they are tied to multi-purpose institutions, libraries are too general. Their identity is caught up with the university or the town, so the average patron does not feel his potential to rearrange the place, leaving his imprint. Hence the library has little personal appeal.
• Libraries are too large. This is a one cause of their generality, because the sheer physical size of libraries makes it difficult for them to assume an understandable identity. Additionally, the "economy of scale" ideal for the library often results in depressingly bad architecture that encourages us to get our books and get out, without lingering to discover new resources — librarians, books and periodicals, or other patrons.
• Libraries enforce an overly strict distinction between patron and librarian. The flow of information isn't just librarian-to-patron anymore, but the other way around and inter-patron. Individuals should be able to contribute to the structure of the library's physical space and information systems.
• Libraries don't serve coffee. This is especially asinine. By comparison, Starbucks serves information (via wireless internet access).
• Libraries underserve groups. Because of their reputations as quiet zones, libraries are seen as places for individuals to read and reflect. But if the value of a library is to grow increasingly from its power to connect people socially—since its market in distributing information is being clobberred—it must serve groups even more than individuals. This means libraries must contain a large amount of flexible meeting space with collaborative tools like TVs, computer projectors, seminar rooms, and chalkboards.
• Libraries discourage talking. Instead, libraries should set up a physical environment that encourages going up to someone who is browsing and making suggestions out loud, using your voice, and making connections with people.

The next question, which I don't have time to think through right now: can you make money doing this? I am skeptical that current library systems will be flexible enough to try out these kinds of ideas, but perhaps we can entice some entrepreneurs to build a "mall for smarties"?

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Gregor writes in his weblog about a conversation he had with Prof. Eberhard Hilf:

hilf demonstrated how equations as jotted down by einstein in 1905 would be almost incomprehensible to modern scientists today. over the years, verbose notations have been replaced by increasingly more succinct ones, new symbols have been introduced. i immediately had to think of leaky abstractions. hilf was adamant that physics was not prone to those problems because it is grounded in solid math.

good for them physicists, and too bad computer science cannot claim the same currently.

Hilf may have misunderstood what leaky abstractions are really about. Had he understood, he probably would have seen that physics and other natural sciences have the exact same problem, and that the mathematical rigor he claims is at best equivalent to the formal definition of computer programs and therefore not even relevant to the problem of leaky abstractions.

First, let me explain the problem of leaky abstractions. As originally explained by Joel Spolsky, leaky abstractions are a challenge to software engineers. Much like mathematics and theoretical science, new achievements in software development build on the foundations already in place. These foundations are abstractions that package up the complexity of other tasks. For example, if you are building a program to download a file over a network, you can use the web protocol, HTTP. Then you can choose a program to serve the file from a number of existing applications, and instead of writing the code to connect to the server, follow the rules of the protocol, and write the file to disk yourself, you can simply invoke an existing piece of software that does this. In highbrow engineering circles, this is called reuse and is highly desirable because it saves development time and avoids creating new code that must be debugged and maintained. It also helps to cement existing standards so that software makers can compete on the basis of innovative features rather than "we crash less".

An abstraction becomes leaky when some of the details it claims to handle leak through and become your problem. Continuing the file-fetching example, what happens if the network is down? You depend on some piece of fetch software to get files, which depends on a network protocol to ensure that two computers can communicate reliably, which depends on a network to allow computers to fling bits at each other. If the network can't handle that job right now, it can tell the network protocol. But the protocol can't do anything about a network that's physically disconnected, so it shrugs. The fetch software you invoked can't do anything about a protocol that won't let it connect, so it shrugs. Your program depends entirely on this piece of software, so you shrug. A leak in the bottommost layer of abstractions has sprung through every other layer, and has to be dealt with outside the realm of the automatic. "Plug in your network cable," your computer says. Do you ever get that message when your cable is still plugged in, but your cat has stepped on a power strip and turned off your network hub? Another leak!

You may already see that leaky abstractions can show up outside of computer science. Do business transactions always go as they should? Have you ever come to a restaurant expecting to get a meal, only to find that they couldn't seat your group? Have you tried to drive home from work in the usual 30 minutes only to find that weather or a car crash dragged that out to 2 hours?

Of course, these are all informal abstractions. In Physics, the abstractions are all mathematically defined. A more rigorous abstraction of driving home from work wouldn't leave any room for leaks. Right?

Well—not exactly wrong nor right. It depends how you look at it. If you're developing the theory alone, you're not going to find that suddenly F = m*a doesn't hold up because e.g. it isn't defined for a = 3 m/s/s; the requirement that definitions be rigorous prevents that. But if you're trying to develop a theory that accurately describes the interaction of actual physical objects, the classical Newtonian abstraction above breaks down at certain points, like when mass is really really small or you're moving really really fast. (More knowledgable readers are welcome to correct/improve my Physics.)

What we see here are two ways to judge the rigor of an abstraction, which I'll call theoretical rigor and applicative rigor. The mathematical foundations of physics ensure its theoretical rigor, but when applied to the description of nature, we can find failures in applicative rigor. Newton's models, though we call them laws, do not accurately describe everything they were once claimed to describe. And applying these laws to real life situations requires accounting for a number of other factors—wind resistance and its ilk. We could qualify the law by describing the highly idealized world it assumes, but that would take too long. We'll settle for expecting the laws of physics to describe limited, idealized versions of what actually happens in real life.

Now back to computing. Most programming languages require that you write well-defined programs—you can't leave out a step and expect the computer to ask you what to do when it gets there. The language usually provides a sensible default, like doing nothing, but this is a way to compress the notation, not to escape rigorous definition. So programming languages, at least those that have an actual deterministic implementation on a computer, actually enforce the constraints of theoretical rigor at least as well as the Physics research community.

But when we take those theoretical tools and apply them to solve problems, we find many leaky abstractions: broken networks flummox our web browsers; buggy data compression libraries leave security holes open in our servers. Each of these bugs is like a wind resistance we hadn't thought of. We hackers had been assuming a simpler world, and so the model of the world we coded for doesn't exactly correspond with the world we're selling software too.

But that's OK: it happens to Physicists too.

• The Curry-Howard Isomorphism describes a relationship between logical proofs/proof systems and computer programs/programming languages. It is described in this Wikipedia entry and at length in this online book.
• I also made a comment in a nerdy discussion on programming language design and the isomorphism at the About Kim weblog.
• Gerald Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking teaches you how to think scientifically, including how to respect the limitations of abstraction.
• Joel Spolsky's original essay, The Law of Leaky Abstractions, is a good read and isn't too long.