A site devoted mostly to everything related to Information Technology under the sun - among other things.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Adventure






















More Statues


Seoul, Korea



Cadiz, Spain



Brussels, Belgium



Potsdam, Germany


Bratsilava, Slovakia



Oxford, England

When Things Go Wrong


































Friday, March 28, 2008

A Critical Evaluation of MOSS Search

An interesting article on SharePoint 2007 from the April 2008 issue of the KM World Magazine @ http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/A-critical-evaluation-of-MOSS-search-41336.aspx

A useful diagram of the SharePoint 2007 search architecture may be found @ http://sharepointsearch.com/images/searcharchitecture.gif

Project Problems in Chip Design

In the March 24, 2004 issue of EE Times we read:





2 Data Visualization Tools

Miner3D has released the version 7.0 of its Miner3D data analytics and visualization software. This release supports interactive & flexible data models and uses the ribbon bar and context menus. One neat feature is the unsupervised visual data clustering - Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps.

Eye-Sys is a visualization tool for complex data; it can manipulate many different data sources, including text files, 3D models, databases, and streaming data. It also provides an SDK and visual programming environment for the creation of custom scripts.

Wipro Goes West

Wipro Ltd. is eyeing expansion in Europe and the U.S. as part of the next phase of globalization. The $5 billion IT services firm plans to open two new software development centers in the U.S. and is studying a sizable acquisition in technology R&D in Germany.

Renegade Economics

Interesting report on the current problems of the world economy - note the imlicit implications for off-shoring @

http://media.pimco-global.com/pdfs/pdf/WP007-090607%20Renegade%20Economics%20FINAL.pdf

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Free Cyclomatic Complexity Tool

There's a free Eclipse plug-in available @ http://eclipse-metrics.source forge.net/ for measuring Cyclomatic Complexity.

Complexity Digest

Complexity Digest has been successfully networking the complexity community since fall of 1999. Find it @ http://www.comdig.com/

The Myths and Realities of Code Portability

Interesting article from the COTS Journal @ http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/home/article.php?id=100767

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Jott

Jott converts your voice to email, text, reminders, lists, and appointments.

Check it out @ http://www.jott.com

It's free!

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Resources for Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence - Wikipedia @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence @ http://cci.mit.edu/index.html

Handbook of Collective Intelligence @ http://scripts.mit.edu/~cci/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Blog of Collective Intelligence @ http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/

Artificial Collective Intelligence @ http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/is/AR/tasks/ColInt.html

Assimov, Strugatskii Brothers, and History

A remarkable idea of the Foundation trilogy of Isaac Assimov’s was that of psychohistory; a branch of mathematics that could predict the future, but only on a large scale; it was error-prone for anything smaller than a planet or an empire. It worked on the principle that the behavior of a mass of people could be predictable.

A similar idea was alluded to in the novel “Hard to be a God” by Arkadi and Boris Strugatskii in which Earth’s Institute for Experimental History had been intervening in the history of other planets – which, by implication, meant the existence of a science of theoretical history.

Both of these ideas are now in the process of being realized.

Consider:

A quantitative theory of physical and cultural co-evolution was first pioneered in “Genes, Mind, And Culture: The Coevolutionary Process” by Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson but they did not really delve into the process of history or the behavior of individuals. [A remarkable work nevertheless that was ignored for the most part.]

The task of modeling human history was performed in the book “Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall” by
Peter Turchin. However, Turchin’s book does not model the individuals [as autonomous agents] either. What he does do is the application of differential equations to obtain gross features of the rise and fall of pre-industrial societies. He pays homage to ibn Khaldun's insights in Al Muqaddamah by incorporating his ideas into these models and arrives at quantitative agreements that would make ibn Khaldun proud!

A quantitative framework for the modeling of the individual agents was proposed by Michail Zak in 2 papers: “Dynamics of Intelligent Systems” and “Self-supervised Dynamical Systems”. The essential idea of Zak is the incorporation of the idea of “Self-Image” into stochastic non-linear set of differential equations that describe the behavior of a single individual (of an specific species).

One would think that a synthetic model that combined the gross approaches of Lumsden, Wilson, and Turchin, on the one side and the individual agent approach of Zak on the other would be an even more robust and powerful model to account for some features of human history.

A possible bridge between the two approaches may be found in the work of David Wolpert and his team at NASA’s Ames Research Center ( http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/is/AR/tasks/ColInt.html ). His approach is based on giving goals to individual agents that would naturally optimize the collective. Wolpert is not interested in history, he is interested in engineering design optimization but his approach provides the glue between the two approaches discussed above.

So, in my opinion, all the ingredients for the construction of theoretical history/psychohistory are there, including very cheap hardware computing resources and computer languages and database technologies. I can imagine constructing a model with 1 million coupled Zak-like agents, subject to Wolpert optimization, which are subject to overall dynamics of Turchin, Lumdsen, and Wilson.

Friday, March 21, 2008

More on Cyclomatic Complexity

In a column titled "Debunking Cyclomatic Complexity" by Andrew Binstock, in the Software Development Times, we read the following:

"... cyclometric complexity does not correlate directly to defect probability.

... routines with CCNs of 1 through 25 did not follow the expected result that greater CCN correlates to greater probability of defects. Rather, it found that for CCNs of 1 through 11, the higher the CCN the lower the bug probability.

... The majority of routines written in object-oriented languages today ... have CCNs in this range. This means that for most code you write, CCN does not tell you anything useful about the likelihood of your code’s quality. (Above 25, CCN does correlate to greater bug probability.)"

The Architecture of the Jumping Universe

Take a look at the book "The Architecture of the Jumping Universe: A Polemic : How Complexity Science Is Changing Architecture and Culture" by Charles Jencks.

The book presents the basic ideas of the Sciences of Complexity and shows many buildings based on this new language by leading architects (such as Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind) along with ecological and organic designs.

More than a decade ago, the architectural ideas of Christopher Alexander (see for example, "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction") greatly influenced many practitioners of Object-Oriented Design and Programming; which, in turn (at least indirectly), led to the (Software) Design Patterns movement and the now famous book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John M. Vlissides.

Road Coloring Problem

Avraham Trahtman has solved the "Road Coloring Problem" conjecture. The "Road Coloring Problem" was first posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler.

The conjecture essentially states that it's possible to create a "universal map" that can direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of starting point.

The solution may be found @ http://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.0099v4

About Me

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I am a senior software developer working for General Motors Corporation.. I am interested in intelligent computing and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.

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