Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Cathedral and Bazaar: a UNESCO perspective

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

UNESCO is unhappy with Georgian efforts to rebuild Bagrati Cathedral.

The ruins are “world heritage site”, and are supposed to stay that way.

The cathedral was sacked by the Mongols in 1265 and the Persians in 1615. It was rebuilt every time. Because it was needed as cathedral, not as a museum. There is something terribly wrong with conservation efforts that deny people the legacy in its original meaning. Apparently, for post-Christian Europe it is impossible to imagine that people choose a cathedral over the money which UNESCO is prepared to shovel for the right to keep this 6th century complex in ruins.

When does a civilization die? Maybe it happens when books become “antique” – not to be read but admired for their covers, when cathedrals become “museums”, when form prevails over the essence, when  chain of ages gets disrupted.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Education, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Shhhh… wanna buy some talent?

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

The reqruiterspeack made its way into boardrooms of the corporations. The talk about “talent acquisition” surreptitiously crept up over the last decade, and became de-facto standard for bundling together workers of all stripes. Whatever happened to skills and knowledge that used to be the market staple over last couple thousands years? What had  happened to the talent, genius, giants?

 Obviously, a devaluation had taken place. Talent used to be unique and mysterious, a combination of skills, knowledge and something not quite identifiable – but you know it when you see it… If you listen to the HR departments today they are all in business of “talent recruitment”, “talent retention”, “talent acquisition”.

How do you quantify talent?  Does this sound right to you: “I have thirty talents working for me”?

One fallacy which this perpetuates is the idea that “talents” are interchangeable. They are not. Talent is unique, a singularity unto itself, and it has to be treated like this.

Tell the Apple board that you’d like to replace Steve Jobs with another “talent” at 50% discount, or Mozart with a diligent graduate of a local conservatory, or Einstein with a hard-working fellow student from Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule…

Another one is that talent can be taught. “Learn to think like Newton, and we’ll teach you how to think like Leibnitz for half-price!”

Maybe, this is the real reason that the innovation sputters in the USA?

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Education, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Documenting Open Source Software with Doxygen

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

By now, open source software has found its ways into enterprise development, and it is no longer a subject for discussion – whether it could be used or not. It can. It is being used by major corporations, and entirely new business models were created around supporting open source, often also free, software.

The prime examples, such as Apache, JBoss, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Drupal, Subversion, Pentaho – to name but a few – are counting their deployments into hundreds of thousands. And then there are less known projects, hosted at sites dedicated to open source such as Apache Foundation,   SourceForge and Codeplex Foundation, which provide components that could be used in your own development (checking licensing terms is highly recommended!)

The good news is that these projects could be used to solve your particular problems; the bad news is that because of limited developers resources these projects might have inadequate documentation, in some cases – non-existent. Here’s where the “open” nature of the software is at its best. You can do it yourself.

My current favourite tool to document source code is Doxygen. The tool was developed by Dmitry van Heesch, and released under GNU General public license. It compiles superb documentation  for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extent D. Here are but two examples of of the documentation I’ve generated from the open source code:

iTextSharp library (a port of the hugely popular iText open source Java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform) and  SharpSSH (a secure Shell library for .Net, created by Tamir Gal and released under BSD style license).

Doxygen generated documentation for iTextSharp 5.0.2

Doxygen generated documentation for SharpSSH 1.1.1.13





Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Education, Programming, Project Management | No Comments »

Lost in translation: Language and Perception

Monday, July 26th, 2010

The idea of a language defining our perception was supposedly disproved by Noam Chomsky’s introduction of the “Universal Grammar”. And yet, this new study opens the very same can of worms again, along the Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis lines.

If Russian speakers could see more shades of blue because the have more words describing it, and Japanese and Spanish speakers struggle recalling agents of accidental events because of the way their respective languages work, maybe our ability to learn and understand semantically significant concepts is also influenced by the medium through which we absorb these concepts – a language in this case?

Maybe there was something to “the golden key” – Latin and Greek Languages, common languages of the European scholars - that kept link to antiquity in the darkness of Middle Ages? Maybe, there is language uniquely suited to learning some specific subject?  Domain Specific Languages are relatively common in computer programming; maybe the concept could be applied back to “natural” languages and comprehension?

A word of caution to the tale…

There is a short story by Robert Sheckley - ”The Language of Love” (1957, Notions: Unlimited); in it a young man sets out to learn the almost forgotten Language of Love, developed by the now extinct inhabitants of a distant planet. After maatering the language, he discovers the reason behind the extinction of that alien race – the Language of Love is so precise and complex that learning (and then using it) becomes an endeavor unto itself, impeding communications with uninitiated, and leaving no time for anything else… ;)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Education, Languages, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Losing browser wars

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Microsoft is losing browser wars on younger generation. The main culprit – it is slow. It is annoyingly slow to start up (what is it doing these minutes while opening on my computer? Connecting to Microsoft to log my session? Initializing umpteen+ plugins and components?), it is slow to render graphics, it behaves erratically with downloads… Wikipedia supplies some stats on browser usage out there: IE @53%, Firefox @31% and Google Chrome @8%.  It was almost 90% of the market for the Microsoft’s IE as recent as 2005…  A bit of anecdotal evidence : my 16 years old hates Internet Explorer for all the reasons listed above – and he grew up with IE using it exclusively up until last year (that’s 8+ years!) , ditching it for Chrome. “It does what I need, and it is sooo fast!”.

I believe that Microsoft became too preoccupied with today’s corporate suits losing the younger generation; after all, they are in business selling Office products. Of course, they are paying lip service with flops like Zune and occasional successes like XBox… but lacking Google’s razor sharp focus. After all, Gioogle is doing exactly what Microsoft did back at the beginning of the 1990s, when facing uphill battle against entrenched UNIX boxes with Windows 3.11 and languages like Visual Basic 3.0. These were FUN!

Microsoft is not fun anymore, it is a serious business. And this is the problem it will face in the future when today’s kids graduate into corporate boardrooms.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Education, Uncategorized | No Comments »

What intuition is made of?

Monday, February 1st, 2010

In his review of a book by Diego Rasskin-Gutman “Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind”, a former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov  recalls his defeat by the Deep Blue computer in 1997  as losing to a machine  “systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force” (as opposed to his “human creativity and intuition”.)

This dichotomy made me wonder – do we really know how our human creativity and intuition works? Could it be possible that somewhere on a deep subconscious level our brain performs these 200,000,000 possible “mecanical” permutations, and surfaces the one that we then proudly label as “human intuition”?

NB: This might go as far back as Hegel’s principle of transformation of quantity into quality (which, possibly independently, restates an essentially Buddhist paradigm postulated a millennium before )

Tags: , ,
Posted in Education, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Scarcity of will

Monday, January 11th, 2010

US elementary school teachers are pretty efficient when it comes to scaring kids out of their wits with predictions of doom and gloom… A ten years old cannot find Europe on the map, or do long division, or say what WWII was about, but he knows for sure that the world is doomed, that humans destroy the Earth, and it all will be gone by the time he grows up! Progress became a dirty word, science is barely tolerable, and most of the time represents the root of all evil – that’s it, when it not entertaining or focused on ecology… (and I am speaking from personal experience)

It is a wonder that some kids still find the will to wake up and face the doomed world another day!

As the saying has it: where there is a will there is a way.  If one to accept it as an axiom (and I do), then the logical conclusion would be that the world would run out of ways only when it runs out of will.

This “doom and gloom” culture constantly underestimates human ingenuity. William Stanley Jevons  in 1865 confidently predicted that the world will run out of coal within a generation; the latest reports tell us that we have more discovered deposits than ever.  Sheikh Yamani, former OPEC oil minister, hit the nail on the head when remarked: “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones”…

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Education, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Flat Mars Society

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Avatar  - the latest eye-candy from Hollywood my kids caused me to watch… Despite stunning imagery, the main message is of doubtful value: ignorance is bliss (by the same token, science and industrialization are evil). This is not unlike Gospel’s message “The meek shall inherit the Earth” (Matthew 5:5) which harkens back to Ecclesiastes’  ”For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (1:18, King James Bible), Rousseau’s theory of Natural Man…  The most recent elaboration could be found in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos where all the sorrows of humankind are traced to ”the only true villain in … story: the oversized human brain”.

What is ironic that the same anti-intellectual message is being delivered with ever increasing scientific sophistication of the medium…

As Robert A. Heinlein once remarked (as I remember it):  “Establishment of Flat Mars Society would be surest proof that it became civilized”.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Education, Uncategorized | No Comments »