Orcmid's Lair
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Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Recent Items
 
Good-Enough Stategies for Agile Courses into an Uncertain Future
 
Symbol of Individual Rights
 
TRUST 3: Hacking the Papal Election
 
The Rise of Anti-Social Networking
 
From Data Hoarding to Information Sharing
 
Foretelling Our Technological Decline & Fall?
 
Situated in CyberSpace: orcmid, Scoble, and those other guys.
 
Blog, Wiki? WIki, Blog? Oh what to do!
 
The Long Tail Meme
 
Goodbye, "Pre-Approved Offer"

2005-04-16

Good-Enough Stategies for Agile Courses into an Uncertain Future

ACM News Service: Shaping the Future.  Steven Popper, Steven Bankes, and Robert Lempert expand on their Pardee Center work on decision making in the face of complexity and uncertainty.  The proposed strategies apply the same principles that individuals do in coming up with approaches that can be refined and corrected as the target is approached and more questions are resolved (along with arrival of the inevitable new questions).  The decision process involves agreement on a near-term course that is consistent will the likely futures.  This is in contrast with requiring agreement on which future is the expected or desired one.

This time the work is presented in the 2005 April Scientific American issue.  The discussion is pretty accessible.  The team's 2003 report, "Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis" can be ordered in print form or downloaded in a free set of 12 PDF files.


I just had the weird thought that this might provide a framework for IT project risk management and future-proofing, too.  I remember being asked by an organization's director why he needed software architects (this was in 1972).  I replied that it was a way of ensuring that his options were kept open.  Now I would add, "while moving ahead, delivering results, and gaining only what experience can provide."  What we didn't do then was apply any risk management methodology, and we made the delivery chunks too big among other sins.  We achieved the hindsight-predictable result.

 
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2005-04-15

Symbol of Individual Rights

Individual-i.  [Friday, 2005-04-15] In Bruce Schneier's Luncheon speech to the ACM/CFP 2005 Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy today, there were only two slides.  The first simply presented the title of his talk: "Future of Privacy: Rethinking Security Trade-Offs."  He pulled together a number of themes that he's been developing in his writings.  At the end, he put up the second slide, introducing us to the individual-i symbol along with exhortation to check out the enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Voltaire on the rights of individuals.

In the discussion around the symbol being all of ours to use, John Gilmore chimed in that the answer to the question "Who made that symbol?" is "I made it," a wonderful multi-level response.  There's more.  This idea stands out on its own; I want to share it immediately from my hasty unproofed note:

A Symbol of Individual Rights - Captured from the Bruce Schneier's 2d slide


There was room at the conference, and I'm pleased to have Schneier's autograph on my sticky-noted copy of Secrets & LiesOHVI OEEL KBTO.  While in Danah Boyd's great morning session with the teen-agers, I was looking for Bruce, whom I've never met.  I had my eye on a fellow whose beard looked about right but seemed too pot-bellied to me.  I must have made him nervous because he moved.  Later, Schneier was mentioned and someone at the podium looked out to see if he was there.  A woman out the corner of my eye raised her hand and held it over the head of the fellow directly adjacent to me across the aisle where I was cozied up to one of the power strips.  It was one of those days.  Later, when he was introduced at lunch, the host mentioned that Schneier now has eight books.  Oh oh, that means I only have half of them, and I've barely cracked open Practical Cryptography.

One other small pleasure:  I stunned a Microsoft employee by having a Tablet PC there too and not being an employee myself. [;<).

 
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2005-04-14

TRUST 3: Hacking the Papal Election

Schneier on Security: Hacking the Papal Election.  This is a delightful article.  I find something touching in it that wets my eyes as I read near the end.

The bottom line is in this summary:

"And a third and final lesson: when an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."
The entire article reads easily and I recommend it so that all three lessons are brought home.  I am left wondering how trustworthiness, my current focus of attention, plays into this arrangement.  You'd think that trust would be at a high level in this setting (perhaps overlooking a lot of history in thinking that), yet here is an elaborate process that seems designed to limit the demands for trust.  Is that the heart of trustworthiness by protocol?  Obviously, trust must still be present.  I sense an inspirational finding here.  I am not sure how to tease it out.
Thursday's must be TRUST day, since this is my third entry about it.  The other two are among the musings of Professor von Clueless.  This is also my chance to brag that I may get to see Bruce Schneier at tomorrow's luncheon of the Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy.  I am going to show up and pay the one-day registration so long as luncheon seats are still available.  A small price to pay to see Schneier and also thank Danah Boyd for the heads-up.  I'm going to try out Blocco, my tablet PC, and blog from there too.  And that means I must do a full backup tonight.  I mustn't have anything on the computer that I can't recover from elsewhere if I'm taking the boy-o out in traffic.  I'm way overdue for a good backup.  Oh me of little faith and great carelessness.

 
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The Rise of Anti-Social Networking

FindTheDirt.com -> Search Requests.  I received the most peculiar e-mail notice at the end of January.  My spam filter caught it and, because the subject was so odd, I looked at its headers for signs of legitimacy.  Although the site names were peculiar, there was not the usual pile-up of faked information and I gave the message a look.

The note, from "findthedirt.com" says there are people who are asking for information about me (or whoever is known by my favorite e-mail address) and others are responding.  I am invited to find out what the people who asked found out about me, for a small subscription fee.

Why would I do that?  Why?

People talk about each other all the time.  People gossip about other people.  Most of what is said we don't know about, and we mostly don't even know about the conversation, for Pete's sake.

So, as an individual, why would I want to know what that blather is, especially if it wasn't something that anyone thought important enought to contact me about?  They've got my e-mail address, after all.  Heck, look at all the people who look at my credit records and send me preapproved offers on a near-daily basis.

This is not like PubSub or a referrer log (something I don't spend too much time on either), where there is a public connection and I might want to engage with it in some way.  This is something else.  I would have put it in the "ick" category except I find it more amusing and ridiculous than icky.

The site is done up really nice, with SSL and everything.  I can't imagine how the business model will work.  In the world I live in, this simply makes no sense.  I am not going to think about it any more, and I can destroy the e-mail now that I have chuckled with you about it. 

Now, you didn't go and search for your own e-mail address, did you?  Feels weird?  Consider that it is only because you now know about it, not that there is anything new (except maybe a scam) in reality.  Aren't we funny?

 
Comments:
 
Dude I know this is OT, but I had to tell you how much I appreciate your comment on that insipid, pathetic Talking Moose blog crap.

Do you see what is going on? This junk is anti-blogging, it is the doom of the blogosphere. When are we going to wake up and attack this horrid perversion of Sincerity, Online Community, Authenticity, Honesty, Credibility.

That blog made you "feel dirty."?? I had the same feeling, but couldn't articulate it. What caused that creepy retarded brain death feeling?

It was...almost...satanic...or something. And I don't mean to be religious or fanatically over reacting. Y'know? Something so dumbed down it was unclean, evil.

I've never felt that way. I've never been to any porn site. This was dirty in a...dumbed down way.

I just cannot capture the essence like you did so brilliantly.

I'm a blogspot blogger. You're family!

Drop by Vaspers the Grate.
Visit BLOGthenticity:

http://blogthenticity.com

You should like both a lot. I hope.
 
 
Steven is talking about comments posted on "The Red Couch" concerning a blog that is authored by a fictional moose.  I'm not so charged up about it as Steven.  I also don't have as much skin in the bizblog game and I hope that I was successful in presenting my personal reaction without generalizing beyond my own experience.  The Talking Moose is still being developed, so I don't know what changes these early reactions will lead to, or not.

PS: My favorite (i.e., only) baseball cap is autographed by a talking antlerhead and I treasure it. But I also know it was a person in an animal suit serving as a baseball-team mascot.  Wanna play guess the team?
 
 
I would have given the mascot's name but I couldn't remember it at once and I wasn't going to go look at the hat.  But I had pie of that kind on Easter Sunday, and when I told Vicki that Safeway has some fresh in the produce section, I thought she was going to leave the dinner table right then and go shopping.  But if you guess the team, you probably know the mascot's name.
 
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