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February 27, 2006
Bob Grossman at the University of Illinois, Chicago
Last Friday I visited the labs of Bob Grossman at UIC. Wow! He, his associates, and his grad students wound me up like a 10-day clock. Wow!
Bob's the real deal -- PhD in math from Princeton -- he started the National Center for Data Mining, among other significant accomplishments. He showed me a new protocol developed by one of his grad students, Yunhong Gu, that nets a 700 to 800 increase in transmission rates over TCP/IP. Those rates don't require any special conditioning and can be obtained over standard Internet optical connections. They developed the protocol to support distributed data mining of very large data sets. The protocol ships data using UDP segments and obtains reliability by replacing TCP with its own reliability mechanism. They submitted the protocol to IETF, which is apparently not interested. Meanwhile, they put their code out of SourceForget.net and have had some 7,000 downloads. Someone has figured out how to use this protocol to transmit multi-media files much faster than using TCP/IP.
Other fascinating projects are underway. One project computes unique identifiers of organic compounds. Using these identifiers, they found errors in an existing technique that is supposed to provide unique names, but does not. That technique, called Unique Smiles, is used by the National Cancer Center, and 20 percent of the supposedly unique compounds in that database are actually duplicates.
Another project data mines schematics. Given a particular schematic, it will mine files of other schematics to determine if any of those schematics contain the given schematic.
I was there on Friday, which is 'open-source' day. On Friday's any legitimate data mining researcher can come to the National Center to work -- the only stipulation is that all work, conversations, software, etc., is to be considered in the public domain and open source.
Leland Wilkinson, Senior VP of SPSS, was there this open-source Friday and discussed Visual Analytics, a new technique for characterizing scatter plots. The idea, based on a conjecture of the Tukeys, seems really big to me. Unless I over understood it, I can see dozens of applications beyond scatter plots. Wilkinson is a part-time professor at Northwestern University -- he's at SPSS because the company he started several years ago has been acquired by SPSS.
Very interesting idea and and wonderful to see a strong working relationship between industry and academics. If you're interested in graphics, check out Wilkinson's book The Grammar of Graphics.
Posted by DavidK at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)
Crossing a Watershed
Bob told me they write as little software as possible. "The more we leverage open-source software, the happier I am. We also put our code out on Sourcce Forge for anyone else to use. The principal value is no longer in software."
Listening to Bob talk with his colleagues and students re-enforced the notion that we've crossed a threshold. The industry began with the hardware era and IBM was king. Hardware was followed by the software era and Microsoft was king. Today, we've crossed into the data / knowledge era, and, so far at least, Google is king. I'd think it would be tough to be Steve Ballmer today.
Posted by DavidK at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
Speaking of which ... If Microsoft Had Invented the iPod
Here's a farce on Microsoft product packaging.
Posted by DavidK at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
An Amazingly Honest Windows Architecture Interview
Don Gray sent me this link to an interview with the Windows team: Darryl Havens, Richard B. Ward, and Rich Neves, all Windows architects. Don's take:
"I can't believe how open these guys were during the interview. They basically said that Windows is a bunch of spaghetti code. It also sounds like Microsoft lost control of the code base. No wonder Vista is taking so long. Really scary stuff when you consider 90+% of the worlds computers run Windows"
Somewhere along the line, I heard that the re-calc function in Excel is such spaghetti code that only one developer in the entire world is allowed to touch it. Don't know if this is apocryphal or not. It might be true, given the video.
Posted by DavidK at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)
Teaching MIS at Northern Illinois University
Last Thursday, I had delightful conversation with Charles Downing who teaches the MIS class at NIU. Charles teaches to 200+ students per section and receives rave reviews. One of his teaching techniques is to have all the students stand up and explain a concept or definition to the person on their left and the person on their right. When everyone in a row agrees on the concept or definition, the row sits down. Charles then calls on the one of the rows to present their answer.
To me, this technique wins on several fronts. First, it gets the students up, out of their seats, and moving around. It also requires the students to practice verbal and negotiating skills. And, in the process of the activity, students are re-casting what they've been taught -- one of the key ideas developed by the Berger Center.
Easy to do, easy to explain, helps to break up the class, and beneficial learning technique!
Posted by DavidK at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
Brian Mackie: Class Management and Teaching Collaboration
Brian Mackie teaches database and data communications classes at NIU. He's developed a class management system that competes with Blackboard. But, Brian's system has features and functions that Blackboard does not, and it's open source. He showed me the system and even created an example class for me to teach. Faculty all over the business school are using the system -- if you're looking for class management software, I'd definitely contact Brian. His email address: m10bxm1@wpo.cso.niu.edu.
Brian has been giving his students a project of writing a online textbook. Students choose a topic, code it in html (either from scratch or using the editor of their choice) and submit it to a class site for inclusion in the book. Students are required to critique each other's submissions, and the author of the submission is required to respond to the critiques. You can find the results of one such project at http://omis5.omis.niu.edu/omis649book1/.
Check it out! Seems like an incredibly effective way of teaching collaborative work!
Posted by DavidK at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2006
Optical Illusions
Some of the best ever -- download here. Enjoy!
Posted by DavidK at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)
University of Denver Renown for Teaching Business Ethics
Last Friday I met with several professors from the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business. I learned that Mr. Daniels' bequest stipulated the college develop particular expertise and focus for teaching business ethics. The Daniels College has done so and today is ranked among the very top business schools for ethics education. The ethics teaching pervades all courses, including the MIS classes. I talked with Richard Scudder, Chair of the IT and Electronic Commerce department, and he promised to send TeachingMIS a description of how they treat ethics in their MIS class. I'll post materials and links as they arrive.
Posted by DavidK at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)
Replacing Waterfall Methodologies at Microsoft
Then, on Saturday I met with a friend who works at Microsoft and who supervises systems development methodologies Microsoft uses for building its internal information systems. For many projects, they've given up on the waterfall development methodologies. Currently his group is focused on scrum, one of the agile development methodologies. (You can find a brief summary of scrum in use at Capital One here.)
Posted by DavidK at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)
Slow Learners or What
The juxtaposition of my trip to Denver and the conversation about requirements determination and scrum put me in mind of work I did at Colorado State University back in the summer of 1974...
That summer, we conducted a study of the causes of information systems failures. We interviewed personnel on several dozen projects and collected survey data on another fifty or so projects. Our analysis of the data revealed that the single most important factor in IS failure was a lack of appropriate user involvement.
Near as I could tell, my friend at Microsoft was telling me their single biggest problem is, yup, a lack of appropriate user involvement. That was 32 years ago.
Are we slow learners, or what?
Posted by DavidK at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
Just Ancient History?
Are these two unique incidents, just separated in
time? It seems doubtful. In 1994 the Standish
Group published a now famous study on information systems failures.
Entitled “The CHAOS Report,” the study indicated the leading causes
of IS failure are, in order, (1) lack of user input; (2) incomplete requirements
and specifications, and (3) changing requirements and specifications.
That study was completed some 20 years after our study at CSU.
More recently, in 2004, Professor Joseph Kasser and his
students at the
In 2003, the IRS Oversight Board concluded
the first cause of the IRS BSM failure was "inadequate business unit
ownership and sponsorship of projects. This
resulted in unrealistic business cases and continuous project scope
'creep.'"
Posted by DavidK at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)
Requirements, requirements, requirements ...
I think anyone who has ever worked on a large-scale systems development project knows the problems. You start asking users what they want and need, and besides all of the problems that attend communications skills, and besides all the difficulties that users have determining (or remembering) what they want, there is the nagging problem of changing requirements.
When I managed the database portion on the IPAD project at Boeing, we put 70 labor years into requirements definition. Of course, while we were doing that, the airplane business moved on. Hence, 18 months into the project, when we had a requirements document that was ten feet tall (truly), many of those requirements were obsolete. The problem, of course, is that the obsolete requirements didn't just jump out of that 10 foot stack.
Posted by DavidK at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
Why Scrum?
Scrum is an emerging technique that is one of the new agile development methodologies. As I understand it, scrum is sort of the requirements definition analog to Extreme Programming. You can find a presentation of the scrum principles here.
A key part of scrum development is the use of user stories. Such stories are abbreviated versions of use cases. Each story is given a brief title, like User Buys Book, and then brief details are described that expand the story. Another key principle is that scrum recognizes is that there isn't one user. There are many users -- or at least user roles. Specifying the role of the user is a key part of the user story.
The development team consists of users and developers who work together, full time. Work is segmented into 2-4 week cycles -- cycles must be short enough to be completed before requirements change -- and a working version of the system must be finished within a cycle. The team meets every day.
Here's an interesting angle. Remember the story of the difference between interest and commitment? It's like the difference between eggs and ham? The chicken is interested, but the pig is committed.
Well, in a scrum meeting, both chickens and pigs can attend, but only pigs can talk. You can find a summary presentation of user stories here.
Posted by DavidK at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)
Maybe It Just Takes Three Tries
I don't know about all of this. I find it very interesting, but so many techniques have been tried over the years, and none has ever been THE ANSWER. Sometimes I think it just takes three iterations. You build what you can, with all of the problems, in release 1.0. Then, you listen to your customers about all of the problems in 1.0 and you get better with release 2.0. You listen again, and finally, you get a good version of the system with release 3.0.
This implies that for most companies, the answer lies with licensed software with inherent procedures and processes. Only vendors, which can amortize the cost of three releases over many customers, can afford to build software. For the rest, the need for three releases until you get it right just makes software development cost infeasible.
I don't think much will change until we have real systems that can build systems.
Posted by DavidK at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2006
Truly A Hero to His Department!
Bob Szymanski at the University of Central Florida teaching the MIS class using online distance learning, entirely. This term, he's teaching 900 students, but has taught as many as 1200. While the class, with its 900 to 1 student to FTE ratio, has been a huge economic success, Bob fears the numbers require him to be more of a course administrator than an educator. He spends a large proportion of his time fixing course access, email, and other connectivity problems.
On the other hand, student attitudes about the class improve as the class moves along. Bob writes:
"There is a change in perception of the course as the semester passes. In the past, I have asked students to share their satisfaction rating with the completely online course. I do this near the start of the term and then at the end. There is usually a flip-flop in satisfaction rating. Early in the term it is about 75%-25% in favor of those dissatisfied with the online course. By the end of the term, it is 75%-25% in favor of those who are satisfied. I've done this only twice, but the results were similar."
Bob breaks the class into six units and requires students to submit an assignment for each. He also concludes each unit with an objective test. Because he cannot grade all 900 assignments for each unit, he randomly selects two assignments for grading for each student. That still leaves him with a total of 1800 assignments to grade each term. He does have some assistance, but still, grading is a time constraint.
The advantages that Bob sees for distance learning to him personally are that he can teach the class from anywhere. He need not be on campus, so he can travel while he's teaching and he can work from home. Bob has young children and this enables him to arrange his schedule around theirs. On the downside, he finds himself teaching 24/7. The students have some of the same advantages ... they can take the class anywhere and need not travel to class. For the more mature students, that advantage works well, but for some, it provides too much freedom. They need the structure of a class to attend.
Recently, Bob and UCF have decided to change the format of the class, probably not going back to the traditional small class, but, instead, finding some alternative mid-way. According to Bob, they're changing the format because
"We want to use it (the class) as a tool for promoting the MIS major, not because it has not been a success. We are having a lack of success recruiting students into the MIS major via this format. I'm not so sure that is has not been an educational success. As I mentioned, for me, I do feel I spend more time administering the class than teaching. However, feedback from surveys have been mixed. Some students feel it was an excellent educational experience, while others did not."
Are others teaching MIS using distance learning techniques? If so, what have been your experiences?
Posted by DavidK at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2006
One Laptop per Child
(via Don Gray)
One Laptop per Child, a non-profit based in Delaware, is creating a $100
laptop with the idea of distributing one to every child in the world. The first
units should be available late '06 or early '07. The computers won't require
batteries. Instead, children will crank them to generate electricity.
Special technology will allow many laptops to share an Internet connection. See http://laptop.org/laptop
Very cool.
Posted by DavidK at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
Applying the Science of Learning
The Berger Institute at Claremont McKenna College is dedicated to applying the science of learning to the classroom. You can find nine learning principles here. All are interesting. I followed the link on epistemologies and found:
"Learning goals may be contrasted with performance goals. Learning goals reflect the desire to understand and master new material; performance goals are more concerned with appearing to “look smart,” especially on difficult tasks. Thus, individuals with learning goals are motivated to actually develop their competence on some task, whereas those with performance goals aim to document their competence, rather than seek opportunities that challenge them. Those who have adopted learning goals perform at the same level whether they have high or low confidence in their abilities on some task. However, for those with performance goals, even high achieving students may show impaired performance on tasks which they are not very confident about performing (Dweck, 1989)."
Learning goals vs. performance goals. Does it seem to others, as it seems to me, that students today are far more performance oriented than goal oriented? Is that just true of my students? Was it always this way and I've just revised my memories? Here in Washington, we have a high school proficiency test that all must pass to get their high school degree. Does this test just re-enforce performance orientation?
Notice the robustness advantages of learning goals.
Lots at this site that I hope to explore in coming weeks. Meanwhile, here are some interesting news and developments on careers:
Posted by DavidK at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)
IT Career Builders Toolkit
Matthew Moran has written The IT Career Builders Toolkit. You can find a sample chapter here.
The web site states the book is published by Cicso Press, but I understand that Prentice-Hall is publishing it as well.
I like the sample chapter and I've ordered my own copy. Also, I hope to have comments from the author on this blog, soon. Stay tuned!
Posted by DavidK at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
SIM and Microsoft Partnering on IT Career Seminars
Jack Becker at the University of North Texas tells me that the Society for Information Management and Microsoft will be co-sponsoring 12-14 seminars across the U.S. this Fall. The seminars are intended for students and and have the objectives:
- To increase the number of students enrolling in IT curriculums in 4 year colleges, and two year certificate programs.
- To influence high school students to consider entering colleges that offer IT programs and prepare for application to those colleges.
- To expose students to the opportunities and rewards for IT professionals in the business world.
- Expose students to the “Real Life of IT.”
I looked on the SIM web site and I don't see any information. If you want to know more or possibly host one of these events, you can get more information from (Dr) Jack Becker at: becker@unt.edu.
Posted by DavidK at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
Microsoft Expanding in U.S.
Microsoft is spending a billion dollars on expanding their Redmond, WA, offices. All the local politicians are using it as a chance to push their latest transportation plans. Not that we don't need better transportation. It's just a little ugly to see all the politicos piling on.
In any case, this is a good sign for tech and MIS. Microsoft is careful with its money and if they're building domestically, then they're looking a positive up-tick in domestic IT employment. They say 4,000 to 5,000 new jobs this year (40 percent domestic), with more to come in the next four to five years.
"'What we thought just a year ago we might need to do over the course of a decade or longer, we are now here today to talk about doing much faster,' Brad Smith, senior vice president for legal and corporate affairs."
BTW, Gates continues to call for more and higher quality domestic university-level education.
Posted by DavidK at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)
Two Feet of Snow in New Jersey?
I'll bet the kids are having fun. If we had two feet of snow here in Seattle, the city would mal-function for a month. I suppose you nothern East Coasters just take it all in stride.
Too bad it didn't fall on Pittsburgh. Not that I care about those questionable calls in the Super Bowl.
Hmpf.
Posted by DavidK at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
Email Is Five Minutes Ago
This week, Bob Grauer at the University of Miami sent TeachingMIS a link to a Business Week article that addresses the low percentage of useful information that is delivered via email. According to the article, in many organizations email is fading as the communications tool of choice.
"Instead, workers there (Dresdner), as well as at places like Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak, Yahoo!, and even the U.S. military, are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another's work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams' use on projects."
While this article is interesting, it confuses modes and reasons for communication. If I want to notify someone the time of arrival of my flight, what's better than email? I don't need IM, nor any of the other alternatives they describe in the paragraph above. For 1:1 communication that need not be instant, what's better than email?
The last paragraph makes me think that they're after bigger prizes:
"So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation's human capital. That's why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it's not as much about leveraging what's inside your factories' machines as what's in your employees' heads.
I don't think any of us ever thought of email as the tool of choice for knowledge management.
Still, as MIS educators, this article points out the need to teach this array of new IT-based communications facilities, and to help our students understand when to use which and for what.
Posted by DavidK at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2006
Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near
In his most recent book, The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil asks big questions and makes large-scope predictions about the future of technology and technology's impact on society, life, and the universe. Some of his ideas are so breathtaking that I found myself asking "Is this guy a crackpot? Should his work be featured on the pulp magazines at the grocery store checkout?" But, his argument proceeds in a way that is impossible for me to dismiss. It's only the conclusions that seem so odd. And history is riddled with people who foolishly doubted strange conclusions based on well reasoned arguments.
Here's Bill Gates' take on the back page of the dustcover:
"Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations -- transforming our lives in ways we can't yet imagine."
Actually, I think Kurzweil has imagined some of the transformations.
Posted by DavidK at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
The Singularity
"will result from the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. ... The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity. We will preserve and enhance the intelligence that evolution has bestowed on us while overcoming the profound limitations of biological evolution." (p. 20, 21)
Ten years ago at Wall Data, we built software that could build software. We constructed a product in which a human could sketch a model of the semantics of his or her data and software would design and construct the relational database, construct all the queries, and build all the forms and reports. It worked, and in fact it still works. Our only problem was that we couldn't convince anyone with a deep pocket (i.e., Microsoft or Oracle) to get involved. And it was too big of an idea for a small software company.
Indeed many projects have constructed software that builds software. In a way, FrontPage, which I'm using right now is constructing software in that it's transforming this WYSIWYIG text into HTML. That's not much. Our data modeling software did much more -- writing pages and pages of ASP code that were inferred from the semantic model.
My experience causes me to believe that software systems can build themselves. They can watch what humans do with them and adjust themselves as necessary. Of course, if they can do that, they can also watch what machines are doing with them and adjust themselves as necessary. And at that point, we have systems that are building new systems, without a "human in the loop."
When that happens, we've reached critical mass. Because at that point, the machines accelerate past us. They work so much faster than we do, they have so much greater capacity, and they are so much cheaper to make, train, and connect. They don't need motivational lectures; they don't require change management consulting; they don't need promotions; they don't get jealous of one another; and they don't die just when they know something useful. They probably will have problems we don't understand ...
And THAT's the point -- once systems can build systems without a human in the loop, they will pass us by and we will be unable to comprehend them. At best, we can hope to be their pets.
Posted by DavidK at 12:21 PM | Comments (0)
Acceleration Is the Key
The key idea is the acceleration of technological development. Nathan Myhrvold once said that human beings are incapable of thinking exponentially. Instead, we pick as steep a linear rate we can imagine, and project it forward. (In my MIS class, by the way, I try to teach this phenomenon. When someone says that data communications capacity growth is exponential, I want my students to understand this means more than steep linear growth. See, for example, Using MIS, page 121a.)
Here's an even more dramatic instance of exponential growth:
According to Kurzweil's research, all of the technology invented in the 20th Century could be invented in twenty years at the rate of development current at 2000. But, the rate of technological development did not stand still -- it continued accelerating, so in fact, all of the technology invented in the 20th Century will be doubled by the year 2014. And that will double again by the year 2021.
"To express this another way, we won't experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will experience on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, measured at today's rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century." (p. 11)
Posted by DavidK at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)
Implications of Exponential Technology Growth
"The Singularity will allow us to transcend the limitations of our biological bodies and brains... By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.
"Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology -- which will be indistinguishable from ourselves -- will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will be the perspective of the unenhanced biological humanity." (p. 9)
Posted by DavidK at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
Nothing New Here ...
In a book that's full of shocking implications here's one more: It's not new. In fact, evolution is an exponential phenomenon. Consider the following figure taken from page 17 of Kurzweil's book:
(Source: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near. Viking Press. (c) Ray Kurzweil, 2005.)
Notice first that this is a logarithmic plot. And note that it is essentially a linear curve, on that logarithmic plot. Hence, if you buy his argument, what is happening today is just an extension of a process that has been underway for 1010 years!
It's a tremendous book. Buy it! Read it! Be blown away by it! What a time to be alive!!!
Posted by DavidK at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)