Monday, March 31, 2008
More Statues
Seoul, Korea
Cadiz, Spain
Brussels, Belgium
Potsdam, Germany
Bratsilava, Slovakia
Oxford, England
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
A useful diagram of the SharePoint 2007 search architecture may be found @ http://sharepointsearch.com/images/searcharchitecture.gif
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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.)"
"... 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.
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
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
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Jack Ganssle On Cyclomatic Complexity
One of the tragedies of software engineering is that, in industry at least, we've successfully avoided the metrics-based quality revolution that transformed manufacturing. Few companies know their pretest bug rates in, say, defects per line of code. ...
Thirty-one years ago, Thomas McCabe proposed a metric called "cyclomatic complexity" to attach a quantitative measure to a function's complexity. It's one of many such measures but is by far the one most used. It measures the number of "edges" and "nodes" in a function, where a node is a computational statement and an edge represents the transfer of control between nodes. Cyclomatic complexity is then:
v(G)=edges–nodes+2
Check out the Web references in the article!
And the comments as well!
Thirty-one years ago, Thomas McCabe proposed a metric called "cyclomatic complexity" to attach a quantitative measure to a function's complexity. It's one of many such measures but is by far the one most used. It measures the number of "edges" and "nodes" in a function, where a node is a computational statement and an edge represents the transfer of control between nodes. Cyclomatic complexity is then:
v(G)=edges–nodes+2
Check out the Web references in the article!
And the comments as well!
