Paulytron

My Father's Obituary

2009-09-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was honored to write the obituary for my father, who passed away at age 86 yesterday. Here is the text:

Edward Michael Bouzide, of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin died Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at Memorial Hospital of Oconomowoc.
He was born on October 22, 1922 in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of Emil and Lilly (Wardy) Bouzide’s seven children. Edward was a chef, working in a long career at various restaurants in Oconomowoc and the Milwaukee area from 1954 to when he retired at age 80. He took pride in how much people liked his cooking.
Edward graduated from Lindblom High School on Chicago’s South Side in 1940. He attended one year of college. Edward joined the United States Army Air Corps near the end of World War II and trained as a ball turret gunner.
Edward moved to Oconomowoc in 1954. His first experience as chef was as a partner at the Strand Annex on Wisconsin Avenue in Oconomowoc, which was part owned by his sister Alice’s husband George Gazell. He also met his wife-to-be Marlene Jaki, originally from Milwaukee, shortly after he moved to Oconomowoc. He was married October 9, 1954 in Okauchee, Wisconsin. He later opened his own restaurant, Eddie’s Lunch, in Oconomowoc around 1959.
Besides his dedication to his profession, Edward also had a passion for historical reading, loved music and occasionally played piano, and worked with wood. Later in life he also became an avid self-taught knitter.
Edward is survived by his loving wife, Marlene. He was also very proud of each of his three children by whom he is also survived: daughter Lissa (Edward Gilaty) of Chicago, and his sons Paul (Catherine) of Chicago, and John (Diane) of Ashippun, Wisconsin and preceded in death by his grandson Kenneth Christenson. He is also survived by his sister Alice and preceded in death by two other sisters and three other brothers.
Visitation will be held on September 11, 2009 at the Schmidt and Bartelt Funeral Home in Oconomowoc from 1PM to 3PM with a service to follow. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the charity of your choice.

VRM 1 - What is Vendor Relationship Management

2009-05-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

I was very fortunate to attend the 2009 VRM Workshop last Friday and Saturday in Silicon Valley. This is a group of passionate and intelligent folks from technology and business who have been working to make the Cluetrain Manifesto-inspired visions of Doc Searls and others a reality. I want to thank Doc here for inviting me to join and participate this group and to meet him face-to-face for the first time, which is a wonderfully unique experience when it's someone you've followed and had some dialog with in cyberspace for a long time. This is also a good place for me to also give credit to Steve Gillmor - who I also had the pleasure of meeting this weekend - for introducing me to Doc through his Gillmor Gang podcasts and for introducing me to the idea of web-based attention and gestures as a source of value.

As a technologist, VRM is something I'm now (afterwards) feeling an even more passionate enthusiasm (imagine!) for and want to make continued contributions to. It's essentially about humanizing commerce. So in the spirit of initial contribution, I thought it would be a good idea to blog out an N-part series on VRM to capture and clarify my understanding. Thanks and a hat tip to Tim Bray for the N-part format I often enjoy in his blog.

Without further adieu, here's my take...

What is VRM?

Vendor Relationship Management is a concept (I wanted to say “business model” and “technical architecture” but they seem too limiting so I’m going with the fuzzy term for now) that is centered on changing the relationship between customers and sellers. (And even these terms are too limiting, but are probably illustrative enough for this introduction.) Sellers are typically called “vendors” in order to provide a contrast with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), but as Doc points out this is a term of art from the technology business, so "vendor" isn't perfect either.

For the purposes of this discussion the current state of the art of the customer-seller relationship can be characterized by the following two points:

1. Sellers broadcasting promotion information about their products and services via advertising. But advertising is:

An extremely inefficient way to link buyers with sellers. Most users ignore and resent online ads, perhaps even – or especially in some cases - “contextual” ones. The fact that paid advertising subsidizes the cost of providing products and services in the world of electronic (and now digital) media and “content” is fairly abstract to people (despite it being around since the early radio and TV days) in that it’s usually not “front of mind” when making decisions about what media products to pay attention to.
Difficult at best to correlate with individual actions – in particular purchase events - that may have been influenced by the campaign
To the extent that correlation can be enabled through technology (such as location-based advertising for example) it is done through appropriation of the customer’s valuable personal information (notably location, attention) without corresponding compensation.

2. Sellers each represent their own model of individual buyers through CRM systems. This is not only redundant, but it also:

Helps to foster a “siloed” business model and interaction process that is painful for users since they need to provide their personal data (minimally name, address, credit card) to each vendor in order to facilitate e-commerce. That this process of “silofication” also helps to lock in consumers by making it annoying at best to switch to a competitor only reinforces and builds inertia into this model on the vendor side.
Inaccurate, which is a consequence of most CRM attributes being generated analytically and in ad hoc vendor-specific ways).

There is a potentially quantifiable belief that this state of affairs results in considerable Money Left On The Table (“MLOTT” in VRM parlance). This is at least partially due to the considerable friction of CRM models of individuals and the inefficiencies of advertising, but is perhaps more a consequence of the failure to leverage the considerable value (through better quality and timeliness) that willingly provided personal information can provide to commercial transactions.

VRM aims to change this state of affairs (“level the playing field”) first and foremost in order to empower individuals and “re-humanize” the marketplace. But there are powerful incentives to business:

Connecting sellers with buyers more efficiently
Improving vendor’s supply chains to lower costs (matching production and distribution to demand)
Opening new business opportunities to match sellers with buyers on the individual’s behalf. This latter role is often referred to as a “fourth party” role (where the individual is the “first party”, the vendor or supplier is the “second party”, and agents who work on the vendor’s behalf, such as advertisers (or advertising search engines) are “third parties”.

As implied at the outset, VRM is not restricted to the buyer/seller relationship (for example donating to organizations like NPR is fraught with the same issues and inefficiencies), but e-commerce (and even “e-enabled” brick-and-mortar commerce) is a major focus.

VRM Architecture

The key technical or architectural idea behind VRM is the notion of the Personal Data Store (PDS). To understand the PDS idea, one first needs to understand what kind of information is maintained about you for purposes of building and maintaining a (currently one-sided) commercial relationship.

The sort of information that’s useful to a seller in a commercial relationship (especially an online one) and that is maintained in a CRM system consists of obviously essential stuff like your name and address (for creating a unique and persistent “identity”) and commerce-essential but sensitive stuff like credit card information. But other useful information includes demographic stuff like age, gender, “income level” and so on. This latter “model of you” information can be subcategorized in a myriad of ways some of which are unique to what a vendor is offering and others are the bailiwick of marketing professionals. I’m sure you can think of a handful. And often this isn’t directly asked for or provided but rather is derived from information you do provide such as where you live. Do you like being categorized this way?

But there is other, more dynamic personal data that is quite valuable to connecting sellers with buyers. Think of which websites you visit, in which order, and what duration is spent there. Think of your current location. Or a trail of location “breadcrumbs”. Or an accumulation of such paths from which patterns of your day-to-day life can be analytically gleaned.

Don’t think for a minute that there aren’t well funded organizations working hard to get this information in order to create “personalized” ads that (they think) will better fit your circumstances and “delight” you enough to incent a purchase event. Does this feel intrusive and creepy? Are you aware of how valuable this information is?

I used the term “identity” before to describe your name and address. All that other provided and derived “model of you” information is associated with your identity. But in the digital world, identity can be fluid. You can have multiple identities, one for work, one for play, one for personal business. Sometimes these identities can serve the purpose of anonymity (nobody online really knows that “WhiteSoxFan2121” might be Barack Obama for example). This is important because without some support for anonymous non-correlatable identity or identities, most people would be extremely reluctant to share some of the more personal and private static and dynamic information currently unavailable to vendors and only guessed at.

The “Personal” aspect of PDS turns this around. Instead of this information being spread around in the CRM systems of each of the vendors you interact with, there is only one PDS, only one “model of you”. One dataset of record that contains any and all of the personal static and dynamic information that was discussed above. A dataset that you maintain and control.

I’ll talk about control in the next paragraph. But first think about some other ramifications of a personal set of market-useful information that you create and maintain. One important benefit is that there’s only one such dataset. No need to enter your name, address and payment information on multiple sites multiple times. Another is that you maintain it. No analytically derived and presumptions sub-classifications. You can maintain your political affiliation for example. Even your medical records.

"Whoa, hold on now" I can imagine you saying. Not inclined to put stuff like that into a computer where it can be fluidly shared with other organizations on the internet for goodness sake? Can’t say I blame you. That’s where control comes in. The other key property of the PDS is that you control who gets to see what information. Not every piece of information is needed or useful in every commercial transaction. But for example if you’re looking for a restaurant, knowing your location and what food you like and dislike can be very useful. Note in particular that your name and address probably isn’t. If this is a transaction with a medical professional, your medical records may be essential. How this can work in a secure way – and probably in a more secure way that your medical records are handled now in some medical provider’s CRM-like system - brings us back to identity.

There’s been a lot of work in the last four years on the technology side in coming up with more secure and more easy-to-use network-oriented identity systems. This work is now coming to fruition and will allow individuals to create identities and associate them with a dataset like a PDS, along with sets of rules that govern which pieces of information are shared with which organizations. Mechanisms like selector-based Information Cards with encryption baked in, and emerging web-based location and data format standards like URL-based Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRI).

The adoption of these new identity models is accelerating. Selector based identity is provided in Windows Vista and is available for earlier versions, and open source versions are available for Linux and Mac and are working their way down to the mobile device space. This coming ubiquity is making the fine-grained control of personal information associated with individually maintained identities realistic. In other words network-oriented identity management is the key to a truly secure PDS.

My conclusions:
• I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that VRM is the killer app of Identity Management.
• The Personal Data Store is the architectural cornerstone of VRM that provides an unassailable technical constraint to the unauthorized use of any and all personal information in e-commerce and thereby enables a user-centric model for efficiently connecting sellers with buyers.

VRM Adoption and Challenges

The VRM concept is now at a stage where technology that supports the PDS architecture is no longer the limiting factor to adoption. The most significant work now lies in making the case to individuals as well as to sellers that a VRM-infused commercial ecosystem serves their interests better than the status quo.

The tremendous inefficiency of advertising as a method for associating actionable buyers with sellers, the data cleansing and other lifecycle-oriented model fidelity issues associated with traditional CRM, and the consequent MLOTT ironically makes pitching the VRM idea to sellers (and “third party” agents working on their behalf) easier than making the case to individual buyers. There is an increasing amount of convincing qualitative and quantitative data (traditional as well as VRM-specific) available to make a compelling case to sellers. The challenge here is the chicken-or-egg one: there needs to be a meaningful number of individuals providing gestures of impending purchase intent that sellers can associate with before traction on the seller side can take hold.

Before specifically addressing the individual side of the relationship, it’s worth noting that there are some models for promoting the VRM idea in a bottom-up way that can provide evidence of adoption to sellers in a low cost and low risk manner. One is to start with some trial communities and begin to cobble up “Personal RFPs” out of readily available web technologies like blogs and microformats, web spiders, Twitter/RSS/XMPP messaging and existing cookie-based identity. Another is to provide user-centric search capabilities that work on behalf of individual buyers (as opposed to the current search model of Google and others who work on behalf of the seller by mining personal information and creating paid “contextual” advertising) and connecting them with sellers. This is an example of a “fourth party” service working on behalf of the individual.

Another way the VRM community is working to spur adoption on the vendor side is to build and demonstrate a cloud-based PDS architecture that co-exists with existing vendor CRM systems. This particular architecture is being implemented by the Mydex Community Interest Company in the UK. It works by using user-verified known-good attributes from various CRM systems and incorporating them into a logical dataset of record that is federated from the vendor's CRM systems. This logical or “virtual” PDS is surrounded by a strong identity layer that allows the user to grant or disallow access to select attributes for select commercial transactions.

This evolutionary approach can go a long way toward reassuring vendors that their interests are being addressed in a way that doesn’t force them to rearchitect their e-commerce systems and in a way that lets them evaluate the business benefits of VRM in a low-risk way.

But challenges to adoption remain on the individual buyer side.

One challenge is that there is no single compelling benefit to the VRM PDS-plus-identity approach. Among the orthogonal benefits are:

A single point of creation and maintenance of one's personal information with an optimal incentive for high quality and timeliness.
The advantages of maintaining a digital record of rich and highly private information about oneself without concern about it being shared with anyone but whom one wishes to share it with.
A much improved experience in finding and buying products and services that better fits one's unique personal context and whose price takes into account the value of the personal information one provides.
The ability to keep transactions anonymous and uncorrelated with other transactions if desired.
An ability to build relationships of mutual respect and benefit with sellers.

Another big challenge is associated with devising and implementing a user experience that makes it easy to create, manage and share the fine-grained information in a PDS in an easy to use and easy to understand way. I still think this is the biggest challenge.

This leads naturally to the much-needed evolution of fourth party services in addition to or combined with user-centric search. A cloud-based model for trusted management and control of Personal Data Stores on behalf of a user seems likely to be part of such offerings and is a fruitful area for innovation in PDS management user experience.

An ability to combine online applications and services with shared PDS information in unique ways are still another “developer side” space for innovation in fourth party services.

So another key to adoption is the development of fourth party services allied with the individual but both driving and responding to the pace of adoption of VRM concepts on the vendor (and vendor’s third party) side.

And the key to successful adoption of fourth party services is Trust.

Geek Talk and Sun Sets

2009-04-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun and occasionally humorous geek talk conversation I had today. Publishing this gives me a vehicle to post my thoughts about the impending death of Sun Microsystems, a vendor I've always had a great deal of affection for (as much as one can have for "vendorz" I suppose) due to their engineering-centric products and "the network is the computer" foresight. Not to mention the Java software development environment I've been associated with for almost ten years now.

The true identities of the participants have been elided for workplace and personal liability reasons. Plus I get to expose you to the way-fun LOLCODE website (thanks Ian!).

Verbatim-ish email transcript below - read from bottom (thanks and a hat tip to Bob Frankston for this semi-effective but easy-to-blog narrative device):

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Firstly apologies in advance to Dan.

No humorous lolcode links here either, so don't worry. I'm nothing if not humorless. I even changed the Subject: line to help steer into seriousness a bit.

But I think this *serious response* (to what might be a frivolous troll-like point admittedly) is or at least ought to be of interest to nearly everyone on _Global_Architecture_Ext mail list and as such constitutes (part of) my job responsibility. So I'm sending this forth without guilt. You may of course choose to ignore, that's your prerogative.

---

What I recommend is *not* "killing" or "switching" languages at all. The idea of killing or switching would seem to imply that we should use one and only one language.

Imagine we have a JVM (and we do for a goodly fraction of all our running and planned software). Doesn't matter *whose* JVM as long as it runs standard bytecodes (which rules out the Android "JVM" BTW).

Then imagine a world where some of our source is written in:
1. Java the Language. This is important for all our existing Java source as well as for new development where some of our devs only know Java the Language.
2. Groovy (and boy do I hate the name but love the language in nearly equal measure) as a high-signal/low-noise language where clearly readable intent in the source is a paramount virtue.
3. Scala where a workload in the object domain both permits and demands leveraging lots of cheap commodity threads and cores to achieve an acceptable throughput and cost of scalability.

Yes I could mention JVM-hosted languages like JRuby and Jython and Clojure (and I'm not opposed to any of those) but they aren't as deeply integrated into the existing Java object model (i.e. all classes implicitly descending from Object) and having access to all of the familiar and effective Object and Class goodness is very powerful from a Java developer standpoint, while still obtaining the benefits of JVM-hosted code that allows existing development and deployment tools and platforms to be leveraged *without change*.

And to those of you who are .NET devs, the concept I'm promoting: developers with a ***multiple language toolkit*** running on a common VM and runtime should also be familiar and relevant to you.

-Pauly

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan
Sent: Fri 4/3/2009 3:22 PM
To: Ian; Boris; Paulytron; Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

I am sorry, but can either someone please remove me from that global
arch ext mailing list or start to post only mails on that list that
are _really_ relevant to _all_ recipients on that list...

Thank you!
Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:48 PM
To: Boris; Paulytron; Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

I forgot to mention the other (very obvious) alternative, Boris:
http://lolcode.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:48 PM
To: Boris; Paulytron; Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

Of course not. We should kill it in favor of Erlang...duh. But if you must have a JVM, Scala and Clojure (yay, Lisp!) will do.

-----Original Message-----
From: Boris
Sent: Fri 4/3/2009 2:45 PM
To: Ian; Paulytron; Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

While, we are on the roll,
Should we kill java as well in favor of say ... Scala?

-----Original Message-----
From: Paulytron
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:43 PM
To: Ian; Boris; Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

No need to apologize Ian. Solaris now is (at best, IBM may just kill it) the next AIX, which is to say marginal++.

If Sun had lived to thrive, it might have been different, what with hardcore Linux guys like Jason Perlow extolling the advantages of Solaris innovations like DTrace, Containers and ZFS. And with efforts to bring the OpenSolaris userland in line with the Linux userland so Linux-trained devs and admins can actually be productive. Yeah I sound like a Sun shill but I don't care. I think it's good stuff is all. Sad to waste it.

But as I said that's all moot now. I'll just counter with the *only* significant enterprise I know that runs BSD or OS X is Yahoo (BSD). Otherwise those two are just as marginal server side IMHO.

So Linux it is (even IBM recognizes this). Right Boris: long live Linux.

Which makes me think of something: if IBM releases the IP for stuff like ZFS (only semi-opened by Sun) into open source (not unlikely) Linux becomes stronger. Apple purportedly has a port of ZFS running on OS X as well FWIW (not that this is relevant server side at this point in time).

-Pauly

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:40 PM
To: Boris; Paulytron; Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

I think you're forgetting the BSDs, notably FreeBSD and OS X (with the later playing a larger role in the Java picture, but the former on the server-side)...

...and I've always seen Solaris as a slowly sinking ship. Sorry Pauly. HP-UX, Irix or AIX, anyone?

-----Original Message-----
From: Boris
Sent: Fri 4/3/2009 2:38 PM
To: Paulytron; Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

Well,

Despite of all IBM is the largest java and java tools shop today. As for Solaris, I think it is gone. Long live Linux and windows

___________________________

From: Paulytron
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:35 PM
To: Lee; AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

"If this happens, it would be a tectonic change in the computing landscape."

I agree. Java and Solaris are (still) key enterprise platforms now. The JVM (but which one!) will remain so going forward under IBM. Solaris? Unclear.

-Pauly

________________________________

From: Lee
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:27 PM
To: AnotherFellowPaul; AlexY; Paulytron; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

Usually, the buyer doesn't want the news to leak because it jacks up the price in the marketplace. (i.e. IBM would have to pay more to acquire them) From a shareholder perspective, if anyone would want it leaked, it would be Sun.

If this happens, it would be a tectonic change in the computing landscape.

Regards,
/lee

_________________________

From: AnotherFellowPaul
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 2:23 PM
To: AlexY; Paulytron; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

Just talked with a relative who has a non-engineering job at Sun. He's planning on not having a job in 6 months. So that's one perspective from which the IBM-Sun deal is far from dead or stuck. My sense from him is that the initial news was an early leak (perhaps intentional by IBM).

___________________________

From: AlexY
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 12:02 PM
To: Paulytron; GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

Does not it looks like IBM - Sun deal stuck? Or dead? No new announcements often hints on that possibility. Or am I missing something here?

Well, good for people who understand hardware. I don't value Sun for hardware, and I see the infamous Schwartz with his unbearable attachment to hardware only as a complete idiot and coward and liar. Natural liquidator. But Sun's software innovations and achievements - that's a pity to lose.

------------------------
From: Paulytron
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 11:49 AM
To: GregH; _Global_Architecture;
Subject: RE: Oracle and HP together again.

The Sun set at Oracle as soon as the market for Sparc CPU set, about 5 years ago.

As soon as x64/x86 became ascendant for RDBMS workloads, Linux (specifically RHEL) became their #1 target. To the point that Oracle forked RHEL to make their own Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). Interestingly, because the installed customer base of unforked RHEL from Red Hat exceeds that of OEL, Oracle still releases and patches first on RHEL I'm led to believe.

Returning to Sun, it's all a little unfortunate since Solaris on (any) x64/x86 box has some true performance and enterprise management advantages compared to any Linux. And Sun's own x64/x86 boxen also have some superior engineering features compared to Dell or HP or anyone else you can name. But Sun shot themselves in the foot when they publicly announced they were killing Solaris-on-Intel I guess it was 4 years or so ago. When they changed their mind a few months later when Schwartz came in it was too late: the perception of Sun as Sparc only was cemented in the marketplace (and even here at REDACTED: ask people's - even technical personnel - perceptions of Sun and you will invariably hear about slow and expensive Sparc CPUs boxes).

But that's all pretty much mooted by the reality of Oracle-on-Linux. And probably permanently mooted by IBM purchasing Sun, depending on whether IBM kills Solaris or AIX. And since IBM pushes DB2, it probably doesn't matter in any case.

Getting back to this HP announcement, the boxen are now commodities. The box in question is running OEL and has eight Intel x64 cores. HP as far as I can tell adds little differentiable value. It could be anyone's 8 x64 core box with redundant power supplies and dual InfiniBand, no?

To conclude: yes everyone knows I'm a Sun fanboy. Can't help it, I have a bias to good engineering despite their often clueless and questionable business practices, whose day of reckoning is now. And I've always balanced this by saying I own no Sun stock. I used to add "fortunately" to that statement, but right now I wish I had bought some at $4 and change a few months ago (or less right after the dotcom bust): IBM is paying more than twice that.

-Pauly

________________________________

From: GregH
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 10:53 AM
To: _Global_Architecture
Subject: Oracle and HP together again.

Here's a new Oracle/HP offering, and the rumors are looking like they maybe true. Has the Sun set at Oracle?

This product looks very interesting for the Data Warehouse option. I can see potential for this at REDACTED. The cost would be the next obvious question.

http://www.oracle.com/database/exadata.html

Regards,
GregH

Freedom to Network

2009-02-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

Looks like it's a steady diet of Bob Frankston posts here lately, but this one's on his usual topic of breaking out of the "telecom" model. A model that I agree is preventing the Internet from realizing the potential to be the equivalent "economic force multiplier" that the railroad and Interstate Highway System and shipping containers of yesteryear bequeathed on us. Which is why I favor "stimulus" spending on network capacity with "strings attached".

I really like some of his turns of phrase:

"They have created a Byzantine system of complex billing systems that have sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy in billable events"

and

"They have given us a funding model which is purposefully designed to create scarcity and have made us pay for very expensive redundant facilities just to have a physical embodiments of the accounting abstractions."

Of course "purposefully designed scarcity" comes close to being a best practice in the "free market" economy, not just telecom. Still it's good to think about all of this in structural terms instead of "good" versus "evil".

Super bowl as metaphor for population trends?

2009-02-03T18:44:00.000-08:00

Of course, since "Revenge of the Rust Belt" is in the NYT business section, it's really not seriously claiming that the Pittsburgh Steelers victory presages some reversal of the massive and (relatively) recent migration to the Sun Belt, represented for the purposes of this trope as the vanquished Arizona Cardinals.

In fact the author argues for continued migration based on a (interestingly visualized) correlation between average January temperatures and population growth for US cities (since the last census I take it). So the title's a little misleading (and a false promise of hope for this Chicagoan).

However (and interestingly for a liberalish paper based in a hyperconurbanized Northeastern city and opinion capital), it's only in the comments that limits to Sun Belt growth are correctly discussed (water availability in the Cadillac Desert mainly, but also steeper growth in energy prices that make the essential air conditioning and resulting auto-centric sprawl - let's just say not quite sustainable).

But there's balance in the comments too: one mentions the fact that heating a building from say 20F to 68F consumes more BTUs than cooling one from 98F to 72F (this was pointed out rather effectively by Wired magazine in 2006). Another commentor points out that established Pittsburgh is culturally less open to newcomers than new Phoenix (Dunno. Maybe. It's plausible I suppose).

And in the "what gives" department, another commentor claims that the Pittsburgh shrinkage figures only consider the city of Pittsburgh itself, not the metro area, and implies that this was not consistently applied. I would agree that comparing MSA growth may be more meaningful, especially when one of the types being compared is a newer sprawl which tends toward annexation models for growth.

Still the author gives a very nice industrial-geographic historical analysis of the rise and decline of the industrial Great Lakes and Ohio Valley cities that has a transportation cost basis. As a transportation and logistics geek, that stuff rings true and fine.

Holographic entanglement reprise

2009-02-03T18:34:00.000-08:00

Here's a timely experimental result that certainly relates to the interesting topic I linked to in my previous post. Check out the excellent animated graphic. It makes more sense after that. It's just not the kind of thing that communicates well as linear text, maybe because those particular words strung together into a concept just isn't intuitive for anyone who's not a quantum physicist...

Holographic mysticism

2009-01-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

I found this on my Bob Frankston feed. It's a fascinating and provocative intersection between physics and mysticism. And I find it especially pleasing that an engineering rationalist like Frankston includes topics like this on his almost exclusively network-heavy (I almost said "internet" or "net neutrality", but Bob would probably disparage these simple and apparently misleading labels) anti-telco/cableco oligarchy subject matter.

For myself, I'm - as always it seems - somewhere between Frankston's hyper-rationalist perspective and what he calls the "false awe" of mystical interpretation of recent scientific discoveries (starting I suppose with quantum mechanics).

And of course it's fun to read serious discourse - regardless of one's own position on the rationalist-mysticism spectrum - that reminds one of "I Think We're All Bozos On this Bus"...

IT's carbon footprint

2009-01-11T11:07:00.000-08:00

Once again discussed in terms of the big kahuna Google here. According to this take, 2 searches generates and equivalent volume of CO2 as boiling a teapot (15 grams). (Although the CO2 volume of *that* activity depends on whether you're using natural gas, electric power generated with the same coal/nuclear split as Google's server farms, or a wood fire.)

Then again, Google claims that 7g CO2 volume per search "is *many* times too high". It would be good if the assumptions and methodology for these claims are also published. But then again, I'm not sure that "grams of CO2 emitted per search" on the server side is necessarily the right way to evaluate this.

The (not insignificant) carbon footprint of large data centers was covered (somewhat misleadingly I think and again using Google as the example) in March last year by Ginger Strand in Harper's Magazine, which prompted me to respond with a letter to the editor (never published in the magazine due to I'm going to guess my tendency to outlandish word count that I just can't seem to suppress).

Here's that text (I think it's once again relevant given today's meme):

It's important to realize that the move to an information- and information-services-based economy isn't as environmentally benign relative to "heavy industry" as is commonly conceived, and Ginger Strand performs an important service in pointing this out in "Keyword: Evil".

But I do feel compelled to point out that some of the numbers used to quantify the impact of data centers like Google's could be a little misleading and ought to be put in perspective. In particular the notion of how much economically useful work is performed for every watt consumed is an important one when impact is assessed and weighed against societal benefit. After all, no human activity regardless of economic or political organization is without some impact on the environment.

I would suggest that a more meaningful metric isn't that - as the author puts it - "thousands of servers" spring into action on each search query, or that "tens of billions of CPU cycles" are allocated to that task. Since "frivolous" or "wasteful" energy consumption is the putative consequence here (and presumably in contrast to other economic sectors or even individual lifestyles taken in aggregate such as watching television or commuting long distances to work), a more useful metric would be to examine total data center CPU-seconds per useful task divided by idle CPU-seconds where a CPU is doing nothing and waiting for something to do. Okay, maybe you can argue that the "American Idle" - sic - query example isn't a "useful task", but never mind that much more subjective angle for now...

Given this so-called "utilization" metric, best practices for data center software and infrastructure engineering practice are intended to optimize things so that the CPUs and other hardware consuming power are utilized as much as possible. This means that these CPUs don't sit idle very long, and can be quickly and efficiently reallocated from sub-second to sub-second as they complete their (subdivided) work for any given search query.

It is true however that these data centers are sized to peak loads, which are no doubt significantly higher than the average ones and so this reduces utilization. But even at non-peak periods these idle CPUs can do something else (like serving Gmail or Google Docs or YouTube, which don't in general share the same peaks) or can be put into a lower-power ready-to-use standby state.

Such strategies for energy consumption management and reduction - which I'd expect is taken into account in the quoted 103 megawatt figure - should also be contrasted with what happens on the receiving end of these queries. Similar CPUs in end-user PCs (and home routers and other microprocessor-intensive accessories) essentially sit idle most of the time waiting for the consumer to click the next web link (or even sit down at the keyboard). Multiply this times the hundreds of millions of internet-connected PCs in North America alone (even when in low-power standby mode which can run around 5 watts) and the data center power consumption pales in comparison.

To conclude, it's absolutely correct to point out that data centers such as Google's have a significant energy consumption impact, on par with aluminum smelting, which is traditionally considered to be a "heavy-industrial" benchmark for point electricity consumption. And it's also worthwhile to point out how an unregulated global economy with sharp differentials between states and countries in terms of environmental protection or rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul subsidization provides incentives to chase the lowest cost and often environmentally harmful arrangements. But to mention this without contrast to other aspects of environmentally harmful energy waste both within the information services sector as well as outside of it is somewhat misleading and might imply that merely eliminating the concentration in providers of information services would significantly reduce total energy consumption and waste, which I don't think would be the case at all.

Relief

2008-11-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

“Relieved” is the best word I can find right now. Now we have to hold the Democrats to the fire against overreach. Which strikes me as easier than the last eight years have been, notwithstanding some of the more classically and repressively “liberal” impulses in the new Congressional makeup. This truly is a centrist country (and let’s forget about the “center-left” and “center-right” posturing when the left/right dichotomy is so demonstrably obsolete) and this election rekindled my optimism on that point and on the fact that “yes we can” also keep some of the congressional excess at bay while getting to work at rebuilding infrastructure, credibility in foreign policy and not least opening the economic “force multiplier” that is a true internet commons. Oh and restructuring the economy away from a foundation based on the assumption of "cheap" fossil fuels...

Dave Winer: fair and balanced?

2008-09-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that Dave Winer invented RSS ("Rich Site" or "Real Simple" Syndication), the backbone of today's web in general and weblogs like this one in particular. His own weblog - Scripting News - is a good read and shows up in my feed readers.

Dave, like Doc Searls, is a mentor to me about how to use this new medium to effectively contribute opinion. Like me they're both technologists with a wider interest in the world at large and not just the technology facet. They both often opine on matters of a political nature. You can see their influence on my blog, which I hope of course represents my own unique perspective which is influenced by but not equivalent to Dave's and Doc's.

So not surprisingly, lately Dave's been blogging about Sarah Palin. The first one I read had (what was to me) a novel take on the implication of the Palin selection. The basic theses (in typical blogging fashion, these are quotes Dave pulled from other sites), which is that Palin is congruent with working class values (note: not issues) in key states OH and PA; that she represents the next iteration of Reagan's "Morning in America" and "small-town values"; and finally that the Palin selection is intended to be the vanguard of an full-press attempt to swift-boat Obama as a true agent of change, rather than Washingtonian-by-way-of-Daley's-Chicago business-as-usual.

Not all of these opinions (or opinionators) represent Dave's (and my) own pro-Obama point of view, unless he's also a glass-half-empty sort like I am and is really worried about the course this election might take.

Dave's very next Palin post in contrast was almost entirely his own words. It's about the media reaction to Palin and (in Dave's words) the media suddenly growing "a backbone" and challenging the received McCain narrative of the Palin selection. Interesting, and (if Winer is correct) a bit scary since one of his ideas about why this might be the case is that they weren't included in the vetting process through leaks and the resulting complex of psychosocial and psychopolitical feedback loops in the sense of the 21st century electronic media milieu where the media oligarchs play a critical gatekeeper role.

I'll close with a Palin bonus link (thanks to Doc Searls for this stylistic tool!).

Can't say I disagree...

2008-08-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

...with this John Judis analysis of what sure looks to be a difficult road ahead for Obama's presidential hopes. I expect tonight's acceptance speech will indicate which way the trending goes from here to November.

Barackonomics

2008-08-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

I've been convinced for a long time now that we need to transcend left/right polarity on many seriously pressing issues, including "the economy" and particularly sustainable and equitable development and (yes) growth. Here's a good example of why I think Obama is the superior candidate, not just compared to McCain, but also to the other vanquished primary candidates Democrat and Republican alike (and don't even get me started on the oligarch-friendly Bush administration).

Pull quotes:

"The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production,” Obama told [David Leonhardt, NYT]. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” But, he continued, “there are certain things the market doesn’t automatically do."

"I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace."

It would be laughable...

2008-08-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

...if I wasn't so afraid that tactics like this might just do exactly what the Republican brain trust intends.

Duh. Ugh.

2008-07-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

Still more examples of things are obvious (duh) and things that are just abhorrent (ugh).

We urgently have to purge these incompetent, corrupt, dangerous ideologues from the body politic with extreme prejudice. McCain - though better than these clowns - just ain't enough of a purge for this non-party-affiliated independent. We can worry about the consequences of any Obama shortcomings in competence, ethics and ideology later. Even if they are worse than I suspect (i.e. as bad as the McCain campaign or the Wall Street Journal implies they are), they probably cut in a completely different direction and even that would be progress.

iPhone and Apple, a jaundiced view

2008-07-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

A jaundiced view from Dave Winer that I don’t necessarily disagree with. Even as I laud iPhone as the game-changer it is (I don’t own one and won’t as long as ATT is my only supported carrier choice).

And even as I let everyone I can know that my move to Mac from Windows is one of the best moves I’ve made in personal technology in a long, long time. But for me the ideal PC would have:

- The Mac’s sense of seamless design aesthetics and “it just works” for non-geek users

- The Windows MSFT Office stack (sorry, not the OpenOffice one, and not the Mac version of Office either)

- The Linux robustness, hardware openness and openness to development innovation

All of this only means is that the open versus closed system war is far from being decided.

Clay Shirky on social software, group dynamics and online communities

2008-07-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

…from 2003! Here's a great pull quote (but please read the whole thing, Shirky is a true scholar of this stuff):

"Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly.

That's part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community -- community leads to content, which leads to commerce -- never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that weren't Clairol products. "But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!" Doesn't matter. The users are there for one another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the users are there for one another."

Of course I have to thank Doc Searls for this link. Doc continues to find and say (same thing, no?) things about communities and advertising business models that resonate well with me and (more to the point) illuminate the hazards of blindly marching down that path without a plan for success. Here’s a great example:

"Facebook also has no conversation density for me because keeping up with it takes too much work. This might be my fault, for somehow allowing myself to have 396 "friends", when the number of my actual friends is far lower than that - and most of them aren't on Facebook. Add "2 friend suggestions, 187 friend requests, 2 event invitations, 1 u-netted nations invitation, 1 blog ownership request, 180 other requests" and "23 new notifications" ...plus more "pokes" than I'll bother to count, and Facebook compounds what it already is: a gridlock of obligations architected, blatantly, to drag my eyeballs across advertising, most of which is irrelevant beyond the verge of absurdity. (On my entry page is an ad for dresses by American Apparel. It replaces one for singles. I'm male and married. You'd think Facebook could at least get *that* much right.)"

However, rebutting Doc, my Facebook profile page has an ad that says "53 yr male. Overweight?". I just turned 53 this past Monday.

Back to the future: let's bring back the Truck Farms

2008-06-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

The way the US economy is currently structured (ahem), the high (and increasing) cost of energy is going to make for a rocky ride. But in dislocation there's opportunity too. One of my favorite restructuring opportunities is underscored in this article.

I hope the increasing untenability (due to the cheap energy foundation) of the suburban lifestyle as well as industrial agriculture will combine to lead family farmers to start growing food (instead of industrial commodities) on what were once the nicely tended lawns of suburbia. Or at least those pie slices of suburbia located far away from mass transit lanes). I'm thinking a modified McMansion would make a suitable structure for staging the produced food and sheltering the supplies and equipment. Redirect the central air into a cold storage "great room". Thanks to the multiple levels of government involved, there are already good roads for bringing the food to market.

Also important: using digital mapping and routing to reduce the energy (and cost) needed to move the food from the myriad of producers to the urban consuming public. Yes, there's still a role for truck transport to play, but we will need to transition long hauls (decreasingly fresh foodstuffs) to rail in our emerging energy future.

Map communities and "openness"

2008-06-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't know, Google's MapMaker is a recently released OpenStreetMap-style "Wiki Map" for Google Maps that lets one edit "maps in the countries of Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Caribbean nations of: Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago"

I discovered MapMaker in a James Fee RSS post last night. Fee's post included worthwhile and insightful links from the open source map content community, some more "maturely presented" than others (the latter link may not be suitable for corporate network browsing), but all reinforcing the point that the "open community" isn't particularly disposed to give away value to entities like Google or Microsoft or TomTom/TeleAtlas or Nokia/NAVTEQ without some form of "open goodness" given back in return. Of course, I'm not sure if this means "free" (as in beer) map content or not, but it certainly means a whole lot less encumbered with contractual verbotens than these entities are accustomed to insisting on.

It’s all fine and dandy to say that these OpenStreetMap folks have no business model in sight, but the fact remains that the “open” meme and the associated communities that rally behind that flag are very influential and have succeeded in the past in turning a significant volume of services, software and content into commodities (notably “digital” ones that are difficult-to-impossible to lock down behind a tollgate). The global economic/societal upside of this trend is that it allows new forms of businesses and applications to flourish on top of these more accessible and open (and yes, lower cost) commodity building blocks (many, many enterprises are taking advantage of the Linux stack for example), but the downside is that local business/corporate dislocations can and do occur. Some die. Some adapt (for example the IBM of today little resembles the IBM of 15 years ago).

I think it was the economist Joseph Schumpeter who deemed this process "creative destruction", which I'd further note most often tends to be associated with the dynamics of capitalism...

VP Hillary

2008-05-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

I've been an Obama supporter for some time now. No he's not a "messiah", he does pander like the rest of them, and I'm super-leery of any taint that comes from his association with the Illinois political sewer. An Obama administration's certainly not going to be "Camelot" (absolutely impossible in the post-Bush mess we find ourselves in in any case). Doc Searls recently captured why I'm for Obama as well as anything I've read recently.

But I'm not posting this to talk about why I'm for Barack. That's water under the bridge since he's the likely nominee now. It seems that I now have to ponder the idea of an Obama/Clinton ticket. Because this scenario seems very plausible to me.

I have to say that my initial gut reaction is positive, despite all the misgivings I have about Clintonian motivations, governance style and integrity. Throughout the campaign I've been impressed by Hillary's resilience and grasp of policy (when it emerges out from her pandering). And from the perspective of bringing home the victory over McCain (which I think will be a tough challenge since the tried-and-true Republican elitist smear will stick to Obama) the Barack/Hillary unity ticket sounds more effective to me than any other veep idea I've heard. Such as Jim Webb to guarantee Virginia in the (D) column come November. Or the smarmy John Edwards to capture the elusive blue-collar white male. Or Bill Richardson to get the Hispanic vote (well maybe that last one isn't too dumb considering McCain's relatively moderate stand on immigration and Obama's seeming weakness among those voters).

But a VP Hillary can certainly go a long way to salve the wounds caused by Limbaugh's "Project Chaos". And despite some alignment on my part with this critique of a recent Tom Friedman post about the need for a tough posture with Iran, I agree with Friedman's implication that a carrot-and-stick posture with Iran and other irritants is what's needed. I trust Obama to provide the carrot, but with the stick, not so much. This is another reason to like the idea of Vice President Hillary Clinton in my opinion...

Roosting chickens, part 1

2008-05-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

I didn't like some of Rev. Wrights (admittedly decontextualized) comments either. But he's not the only religious figure spewing polarizing nonsense. Perhaps the media's starting to pick up on this.

twitter

2008-05-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

So I'm using TwitterFeed to publish anything I blog here to my Twitter followers (not that I have many, but that's not the point).

Actually I added TwitterFeed as an experiment with my new Yahoo OpenID (since TwitterFeed supports OpenID), but it does have the following benefits:

I have an alternative to GTalk and SMS to post tweets.
My Paulytron blog content is tweeted.

But it would seem to have one not insignificant drawback:

My Paulytron blog content is tweeted.

I thought Twitter tweets are supposed to be "micro-blog" content. And indeed some Paulytron posts will qualify.

But anyone who knows me knows how long-winded I can be. And some blog entries are appropriately "macro" anyway. Maybe there's a way to control which blogs get posted as Twitter tweets...

Paulytron's back in the saddle

2008-05-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

I let my Blog-City blog expire. I'm not embarrassed, most blogs wither on the vine due to neglect. But what does get me a little sheepish is that Blog-City went away and about half my posts were lost forever. The other half I scraped out of the internet WaybackMachine.