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.

My Thoughts on Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg

A world without cyber espionage would be incredibly dull. At least this is what reading The Cukoo’s Egg made me think. Unfortunately I have never actually tracked down a cyber-terrorist. I am, however, aware that cyber-crime happens frequently enough to merit my caution in setting passwords on my own sensitive documents and securing my internet connections. In the current era of internet usage many more people are aware of internet crime and safety than were aware of those things during the 60’s or 70’s. This is a good thing as tools have been developed to make hacking super easy. A script kiddie is a person who does not possess the skills or doesn't use them to do their hacking, but uses a pre written program to do the job. The hacker in The Cukoo’s Egg was very much an expert in hacking and with computers in general. I believe that today we are in the dark as to how easy it is to find security vulnerabilities in software. For example, lately, many video games which have been coming out have a modified or cracked version which is distributed online with in a day of being released. It is super easy to use a program to jailbreak even proprietary hardware such as the IPhone. 

One of my favorite parts in The Cukoo’s Egg was the fact that Cliff's original career was not in computer science, he was an astronomer. I am pretty sure astronomy majors are not required to learn too much computer programming to get a degree today. At the same time I do know of a few individuals who are graduating with degrees other than computer science and are currently working in meaningful programming positions. I believe in the near future most careers will demand at least a proficient skill level in some sort of programming; even high schools are starting to incorporate programming into their curriculum. If it is not for the abilities that people should be educated in computer programming it is for the knowledge of how programs work. It would be pretty scary to have an office full of ignorant people downloading whatever software from the internet, and unknowingly compromising a secured network where a company stores and communicates its trade secrets.  The world is fast becoming subservient to the internet, relying on a search engine or database query to get information quickly; if we are not educated about the way technology we use works, we will not be a valuable asset in the workforce. 
  

One word continually came up throughout the plot, bailiwick. Bailiwick by the dictionary means: “One’s sphere of operations or particular area of interest.” It is seems incredible that the FBI was not even willing to look into this case of cyber espionage. They were so unconcerned with a cyber-crime that they told Cliff: unless there were millions of dollars missing or someone was being injured they would not take the case. Many other people said that they couldn't help out in any meaningful way, however they were very interested in the outcome of the hunt. Today we have many new technologies which are being used for various activities which are in the legal gray area. For example drones in the last couple of years have become such a reality that the FAA has had to make, and are still refining, new regulations concerning the use of un-manned air craft. Amazon has been experimenting with a drone package delivery systems which could be revolutionary to the delivery system as we know it. What is the legality of it? Should it be regulated? Whose bailiwick is it to decide?

It was very fun to read about the history of my career field. While reading I came across Cliff’s discovery of Object Oriented Programming, the battle of unix systems, and first generation software applications such as GNU-emacs. I very much appreciated being able to know how a programmer thought about and worked with the technology I have only heard of from older programmers. It was very much like reading a history book about the civil war or the roaring 20’s. Much like we read history books so that we learn from others mistakes, we should treat The Cukoo’s Egg with a similar mindset and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. 

Geneology via DNA Testing

Recently in the United Kingdom nationhood has been a hot topic, especially in the area of Wales. An article by the BBC cites a study called the CYMRU DNA project which is asking the citizens of Wales with certain last names to take DNA tests which will help create an ancestral profile of the people of Wales. The project is hoped to shed light on the true origins of the Welsh community. The testing is done through a process of DNA analysis from an individual’s saliva specimen.  I think this is a great example of the secular benefit of knowing your family’s history. As technology advances it affects how we think of our families and who is a part of our family tree. The Welsh are trying to put together a history of their nation using the latest known technology in human relationship analysis. It will be interesting to see how accurate these tests turn out to be and what significant data they uncover about their population.

Here are two recent articles which talk about the Cymru project:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-29340077

http://www.green-bay.tv/news/2014/09/26/cymru-dna-wales-project-set-to-rewrite-welsh-history/