Tag Archives: heroes

Shirky confirms Shenk

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Clay Shirky, in a recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York, challenged us to stop talking about information overload as an excuse, recognize it as a fact (one that’s existed for a long time and will not diminish in the future), and to work on building better filters.

Watch Clay Shirky on information overload versus filter failure:

Titles like the Boing Boing one are kinda unfortunate because they frame Shirky’s view to be one that would be in opposition to lets say, David Shenk’s from his book “Data Smog”.

Far from it.

David Shenk attempted to identify the information landscape we are living in now way back in 1997. In a 2007 piece in Slate he took a critical look back.

As with any look forward, the book wildly missed the mark with some of its more grim predictions, but in many ways still has much to offer and think about.

In particular, towards the end of the book Shenk proposed a personal call to action for building better filters (learning to be our own for example) and to be better information producing citizens (being our own editors). Big foreshadowing of Shirky’s talk there.

Most reviews of the book focussed on Shenk’s definition of the problem and pooh-poohed his suggestions. So here we are, many years down the line, and most of the focus is *still* grousing about ‘information overload’.

Clay Shirky’s point is its high time to stop doing that and get busy building the tools, protocols, customs and businesses that will help us not only deal with it, but thrive from it.

Using the Internet and Media to Make a Difference

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Being the Difference names Mark Horvath “Person of the Year”.

Read the link – be inspired – then find a way to act. No matter how small. A tweet here, a blog post there, actually can push the ball forward. Making a donation to organizations like Project HOME or donating your time, even better.

Lately, my mind has been thinking about Camden Hopeworks. They are a nonprofit teaching program that provides youth with experience building websites and GIS/Mapping solutions for clients across the area. Check out the Hopeworks GIS Gallery.

Bob Burtman, for Miller-McCune, recently wrote a related piece about GIS, “The Revolution Will Be Mapped”. You will want to check out the Metafilter thread it spawned.

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace day

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I spent last night, like many recently, riffing in Scratch to Emma’s direction. You might wonder what the goal of that would be with a 3 year old – but its simple – programming can be – and is – fun. While we play there on the laptop – Emma has no idea that we’re programming – just that we’re being creative in a way that is similar to when we play music, or color, or sing and dance, or build with our legos. Next step is to get her a keyboard and mouse she can tear apart if so inspired. Like her own ukulele, or her lego brick creations, what she’ll come up with on her own is bound to be awesome.

I mention this because, as the title of the post says, yesterday was Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and can be considered the world’s first computer programmer. She was born in 1815.

For those not in the industry, it probably comes as some kind of shock that the person considered a computer programmer is a woman. That shock is no doubt due to the fact that the industry has so few women participating in it. It wasn’t always so. And it suffers because of it.

Here are some good reads and links:

Kimberly Blessing: Honoring Ada, Inspiring Women (the story of women in computer programming is commonly taught to begin and end with Ada – which is very incorrect)

guardian.co.uk: Let’s hear it for women in technology

Aaron Swartz: Margo Seltzer – on the creator of BerkleyDB.

KathySierra tweet on women who have made a difference in tech: Just a few of the tech women who made/make a diff: @whitneyhess @avantgame @xenijardin @zephoria @dori @burningbird @maryhodder @nicolesimon

findingada: Ada Lovelace Day

Rest in peace: Bettie Page and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry

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Bettie Page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008)

LATimes: Bidding Bettie Page farewell:

“I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer,” Page explained in an interview years later.

“I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.”

Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (February 23 1932 – December 18 2008)

Projo Subterranean Homepage News: Voice of the Star Trek computer, Majel Roddenberry, dies at 76:

See, Gene was a fantastic storyteller, probably the best in the business. What he did was tell stories. He didn’t lay plots and ideas and things like that — he told stories. You can take any one of our stories that we use right now, put western clothes on us, stick us out in the west and they’ll work just as well — any single one of them — because they’re stories about people, they’re stories about things. And, of course, Gene had to put some of his philosophy into each one of them, but that was just his way of, really, getting past the censors. The censorship in those days was just horrible.

Who is Clay Shirky?

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For coworkers (you know who you are…):

Jeff Atwood says, It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet, We Just Live In It

Hugh Macleod says there is only Clay Shirky’s Law: Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two.

Ted: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration:

Clay Shirky is author of the recent “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” (on my must-read list), and from his bio:

Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist’s Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his “After Darwin” column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O’Reilly’s bioinformatics series. He helps program the “Biological Models of Computation” track for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conferences.

Among his must read essays for anyone developing a social app of any kind:

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Power Laws, Weblogs, , and Inequality

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Communities, Audiences, and Scale

Shirky, to me, is noteworthy for his balanced views on the Web and its applications to and effects from society.

Far more here.

YouTube: Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style:

Sad News

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Every day so many of us struggle with what we consider ‘fair’ or right in the world. Randy Pausch shows us that being consumed by that question can be a distraction from what is truly important – to live our lives to the fullest no matter the cards we are dealt.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Randy Pausch, noted CMU prof, succumbs to cancer.

His work has touched the lives of many, his “Last Lecture” has inspired people around the world.

“Happy 300th, Ben!”

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Philadelphia Inquirer: Happy 300th, Ben!:

If Benjamin Franklin were alive, he might skip the events planned around town today for his 300th birthday.

Too much folderol for his taste, too much speechifying. Too much Franklin, Franklin, Franklin.

It would offend his sense of modesty, and while Franklin wasn’t humble (he knew he was smarter than most), he worked hard at being modest.

It was a virtue he cultivated, aware of its value in everyday life. To be a leader of men, he realized, it was best to be one of the guys: generous in praise, respectful of divergent opinions, quick to give credit to others, slow to take it himself.

In short, Franklin was a genius with a first-class disposition, a rare thing. His brainpower, his energy, and his high emotional IQ made him the de facto civic leader of Philadelphia, its go-to guy, while still in his 30s.

The story of the founding of Pennsylvania Hospital is one example of his uncanny ability to get things done.

It wasn’t Franklin’s idea. It was Dr. Thomas Bond, a London-trained physician, who wanted a hospital for the poor and indigent. As Bond pitched his idea around town, people invariably asked: Have you talked to Franklin?

Franklin embraced the plan. But how to raise the 4,000 pounds?

Franklin had an idea. (He always had an idea.) He had a citizen petition presented to the Colonial Assembly, asking it to create a hospital.

When – as he knew they would – rural legislators objected to such a large expenditure for Philadelphia, Franklin, a member of the Assembly, rose and asked it to put forward half the money – but only if the other 2,000 could be first raised privately. Assembly members agreed, thinking that the private appeal would fail but that they could collect political credits for their generosity.

Franklin then organized the fund-raising, the 2,000 pounds was raised, the Assembly put up the other 2,000 pounds, and America’s first hospital was erected at Eighth and Pine Streets, where it stands today.

Thus did Ben Franklin invent one of the mainstays of modern philanthropy: matching funds.

As Franklin wrote later: “I do not remember any of my political manoeuvres, the success of which gave me at the time more pleasure…”

The hospital was chartered in 1751, three years after Franklin retired to give time to civic and scientific pursuits.

To friends who asked why he would give up a lucrative printing business, Franklin explained that when he died, he would rather have people say that “he was useful” than “he was rich.”

Related: Dan Rubin: Happy Birthday, Blog Daddy. Indeed he was.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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On Vietnam: (listen to the whole speech):

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death… America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

On political strategy/solidarity:(listen to the whole speech):

Now the other thing we’ll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively — that means all of us together — collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.

On Equality:(watch it):

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

(via MFA)

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

(via Pax Romano)

More at Philly Future

James Doohan, “Scotty”, Rest In Peace

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Yesterday afternoon I heard the news that James Doohan had passed. My wishes to his family, his friends, and to all my Star Trek buds out there.

CNN obit and Memory Alpha’s Bio of Montgomery Scott.

Previous employers have looked at me as ummm a “miracle worker” – and ahhh – I let on my secret once to my former boss, Rajiv: applying the “Scotty Rule” to project estimations. Never, ever, ever quote the time it would take to finish a project accurately. Pad it. Double and triple it.

From the TNG episode “Relics’:

Scotty: “Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.”

LaForge: “Yeah, well, I told the captain I’d have this analysis done in an hour.”

Scotty: “How long will it really take?”

LaForge: “An hour.”

Scotty: “You didn’t tell him now long it would really take, did you?”
LaForge: “Of course I did.”

Scotty: “Laddie, you got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!”

From “Star Trek III: The Search For Spock”:

Kirk: “How long to re-fit?”

Scotty: “Eight weeks. But you don’t have eight weeks, so I’ll do it for you in two.”

Kirk: “Do you always multiply your repair estimates by a factor of four?”

Scotty: “How else to maintain my reputation as a miracle worker?”

Kirk: “Your reputation is safe with me.”

God bless and God speed.