Ignorance Is Not Ethical

Imperative 2.3 of the ACM Code of Ethics is to know and respect existing laws pertaining to professional work. The use of the word "know" is an interesting insertion into this imperative. This implies that, not only are we responsible for upholding the laws which we are aware of. We are also responsible to actively seek to become aware of the laws which we may be ignorant of. I think this is a great ideal because ignorance is irresponsibility. If one has decided to become a professional in a career he should be held accountable for obeying the law within his profession. It should be just as important for a professional to know the cultures, ethics, and laws, in a particular field, as it is for them to know the trade.

Coding is for Girls

The actual statement is 1:23 seconds long. 

There is a 15 second introduction.

Over the Thanksgiving break, millions of people watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. One of the floats which caught my attention was the Goldie Blox float which had the acronym, S.T.E.M, proudly displayed on it. Goldie Blox is a company which makes toys for girls that help develop the necessary skills for the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields. I think this is a great step towards getting rid of that social stigma where people think S.T.E.M careers are meant for men. That way of thinking starts young and I applaud any program which helps children get excited about problem solving. Code.org is another organization which has gotten some good media coverage recently. They have put together an interactive site where children can learn to write code while interacting with the popular “Frozen” movie characters. It starts off with a simple pseudo code game making Elsa move in different directions, and develops from there. I hope that in the future our children both male and female have many opportunities to learn coding skills through play. Most importantly I hope that our society can change, to view coding as a skill which is just as necessary for girls to learn as it is for boys.

Where is the Unbalance?

People who play MMORPG's perhaps are looking for a social element which has been absent in their reality. Many people who are addicted to MMORPG's have found that they are popular or accomplished in the virtual world. Because these games are essentially a large social network, the stimulating effects of becoming the hero in these games are just as powerful as becoming the hero on the football field. Everyone has a need to feel needed. If our society is not able to offer everyone a way to become successful and important, those who are socially rejected will turn to other avenues to find their place. I don't see our society moving away from the clubs, cliques and classes which promote favoritism and leave others as unimportant and under-appreciated. Therefore I find it fortunate that the virtual world can provide an alternative to our socially biased reality.

The Power of the Community

Reading Here Comes Everybody it was often stated that institutions have a “Coasean Ceiling” meaning that an institution can only grow to a certain size before the cost of management becomes prohibitively large. Google is one of the largest public business institutions I am aware of and it doesn’t seem to show signs of slowing.  Shirky explains in chapter ten that large institutions have little room to make innovative discoveries in their fields because the cost of failure is too high. Google is an extremely innovative company, as they have developed many cutting edge technologies.  Google glasses was an ingenious idea which hasn’t necessarily been a huge pay off for them. The self-driven car which they are spending millions of dollars on currently is having some problems getting approved.  It seems like they have had plenty of failure while still being a huge institution and they are thriving financially. Maybe I am missing something; according to Shirky this should not be the case.

In my analysis of Shirky’s observations of traditional institutions in relation to Google, I have not yet taken in to account that Google may not be as traditional of an institution as I first thought. I wonder if Google has enough revenues coming in from their data analysis and search engine advertising to spend outrageous amounts on research and development. I have heard that Google uses more of a flat managerial hierarchy. This managing style may cut down on the cost of the institution.

Personally, I found one of the most applicative topics in this book to be that of “publish now filter later.” This has quickly become the way the internet is run. There is so much media being published on a regular basis the only way we can know what content is important is by the filters which we or the community create. I regularly use amazon.com to make purchases; at amazon we find a great example of the need for a community filter. When a user searches for a particular item the results offer hundreds of varieties of that same item. The most reliable way the community has found to filter these items is to submit user reviews. The reviews on any given item are the single most influential factor to a purchasing decision on amazon. It may be observed that many companies, along with amazon itself, offer free products to frequent reviewers in exchange for an honest review of their items. This behavior demonstrates how important reviews have become to amazon. In general the “publish now filter later” principal is beneficial to our online media community for the same reason Shirky gives for open source’s advantage over the traditional institutional development: the cost of failure is free. As an example, it takes no money to post a video to YouTube today, if the community likes your video enough and views it consistently you will be rewarded monetarily. This is good for the community because those “brilliant but erratic” amateurs have a platform to publish their masterpieces.

Very often brilliant ideas are inaccessible to institutions because they are forced to hire the “steady performer” versus the “brilliant but erratic” programmer. This is what the CS department is teaching the students coming through BYU. We are being taught to be the steady performers talked about in the book. It is sort of up to us to have the brilliant ideas but we are taught the skills necessary to get steady jobs in the institutions. As developers going into the technology field it will be necessary to take in to account how new technology changes the ways people interact and think. If we can use the internet to harness the social connectivity it promotes new businesses and idea become possible.

What happened to women in Computer Science?

According to statistics curated by an NPR reporter, from about 1965 until 1984, the number of women in computer science was on the rise. These numbers correlated to the number of women going into the medical field or law; while the the number of women going into those other careers continued rising steadily the number of women in computer science began to decline in 1984. I find it interesting that was the year the Apple Macintosh was released. The ensuing media campaign for the Macintosh included an ad with a bunch of men marching like zombies and a scantily clad large chested woman running down an isle and throwing a hammer at the "Big Brother" figure. I believe that when personal computing started to become popular the marketing was mostly targeting men and wrongly it became a social paradigm that  computers were boys toys. I don't know the exact reason for the decline in women in computer science; I do know, however,  that the women we have working in computer science now play a vital role in the future of the field and I am grateful for my friends who are women in the industry.

The Ethics of Open Source

Can a developer be expected to give away the Intellectual Property which may be a means of providing for his family? Open source software most certainly has its place on the internet, it allows communities to grow and improve a software together.This  encourages the application of technology to the society for the common good. Free software is a worthwhile philosophy, one which I find myself being involved in from time to time. I do, however, believe that just as a writer of a novel is entitled to the exclusive rights of what he develops, a software creator is entitled to exclusive rights of  the code he has written. Pressuring a developer to release his source code is like pressuring an artist to put their music up on the internet for free or asking an author to release his book at no charge. Just as the musicians and the authors are, for the most part, in the business to make money, likewise, for the most part, the software programmer is in the software industry to make a living.

Dot Con

Recently I watched a documentary on the Wall Street dot com inside trading scandal called “Dot Con.” My initial reaction was that these companies who are making millions of dollars on their initial public offering are super lucky. When a “.com” company went public its initial investors were made millionaires overnight. It is just disgusting to me how the investment bankers, in charge of taking the company public, were using the IPO of the company as a form of legalized bribery. There were some cases where a company’s stock price had already increased by literally hundreds of dollars and the broker would offer the stock at the initial offering price to those who he could collect favors from later. This never would have happened if investors were smarter about the companies they invested in.  Many novice investors were getting nailed at the tail end of these “pop stocks” and stuck with the outrageous priced stocks in a company who may not have any sort of plan to become profitable in the future. If someone wants to invest in a company, I hope they use this tragic situation as an example; it is necessary to do research on a company before one invests in it.  It is usually better to invest in a solid company you can trust to make good business decisions and give you small profits, than it is to blindly trust someone because of the enormous amounts of money they say they will generate for you.