Austin library unclear on the concept

The Web catalog is currently on-line:
Sunday 10:30 a.m.-12 midnight
Monday-Friday 6 a.m.-12 midnight
Saturday 6 a.m.-9 p.m.
The Web catalog is not available on Library holidays.
Do they have little sql elves to fetch the book references from the database? Does the web server belong to a union?
Or do they take the system down every night while data entry clerks in Bangalore add new novels and take away obsolete collections of magazines.

Intimacy gradient

Socialtext is based on wiki which, which uses a model of collaboration coming from the world of agile software development.
Within a team, there is a level of trust. People want to be able to work together quickly, with few barriers. If someone makes a mistake, others will rally and correct it. The capabilities of the team as a whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so it’s great to be able to get contribution from everyone. People are working quickly, in short iterations. It’s important to be able to contribute quickly, with as few steps and interruptions as possible.
The original wiki model was fully open to the public. Socialtext supports public wikis, which are fully open, and private wikis, which are open to members of the team.
Larger organizations require a more sophisticated model than “public” or “private.” There are models to draw on from Christopher Alexander, an architect whose work on “pattern languages” describes the design patterns in the physical built environment, ranging in scale from rooms, to houses, to streets, to neighborhoods and cities.
Alexander writes about an “intimacy gradient”. There are some areas in a house that are public — the front porch; areas that are indoors and public — the living room; and areas that are indoors and more private — bedrooms and bathrooms.
The design opportunity is to create livable, workable, more-public and more-private spaces, using a “social software method” that focuses on helping people connect and collaborate with people in the least restrictive, most appropriately trusting way.
This is a different design philosophy than the traditional methods for setting levels of privacy. The underlying traditional assumption is that information should be available, and users should have privileges, on a “need to know basis.” Individuals should have as little information and as few privileges as they need to do their jobs.
The goal of a tool for group work is to be able to restrict access with as much control as possible. Content and privileges should be controllable at a highly granular level. A work process should be clearly defined, to determine what users should have access to what information, and a given stage of a process.
This methods depend on a highly-structured, formal process. Analysts and administrators need to carefully define the types of information, to parcel out privileges, and to be able to monitor information access.
These processes and assumptions are right for some environments, and wrong for many others. If an organization needs a highly structured, controlled, restricted process, then Socialtext is probably not right for that need.
Many knowledge workers overuse email, because that’s the only way they can get the kind of rapid, flexible communication that’s appropriate for the collaborative work they’re doing.
Socialtext is seeking looking to add more layers to the “intimacy gradient”, without recreating the highly structured collaboration tools that exist today.

Weblog muse

There’s a class of private conversation thats an alcove in a broader, more conversation.
You develop ideas in exchange with someone, and those ideas are shared by blog or wiki. The social convention is to credit the blogmuse, and the source of conversation (in person, on IM or IRC channel.
Like many social interaction, the norm is based on give and take. It would be unfair for one party to interview another and continually post the results. It is normal give and take to share ideas, credit sources, and put the ideas out in public as material for further conversation.
The traditional muse is female, the artist is male. The physical beauty of the muse inspires the artist to create. The muse is a model, not a collaborator.
The blogmuse is any gender, and the conversation is the inspiration. The ideas are created collaboratively. Who blogs is a matter of the day.
The tensions of authorship and inspiration are more relevant in weblog form, which is individually authored, than wiki form, which is group authored. Although wikis are not necessarily public domain — some wikis have collective ownership of content, without permitting wholesale copying and repurposing elsewhere.

I don’t get Mailblocks

And the other services that require human intervention before an email address is whitelisted.
Don’t folks realize that they have anti-network effects? They’ll work for the first few people who use them. But what happens when a mailblock bounce comes back to another mailblock service?
People will have to wait for the singularity to get their email.

The Geography of Thought

I’ve wondered idly whether the naming game between adults and infants was universal, or culturally-specific. It turns out that Western children learn nouns faster than verbs “that’s a ball. see, ball” and East Asian children learn verbs just as fast.
Richard Nisbett’s “The Geography of Thought” includes a variety of experimental evidence showing how East Asians and Westerners think differently.
When shown pictures of a cow, a chicken, and some grass westerners are more likely to group the cow and the chicken, while East Asians are more likely to group the cow and the grass. Westerners are more likely to organize things in categories, while Asians are more likely to organize by relationship (the cow eats grass).
Westerners perceive things as objects (a bowl), easterners as substances (wood). Westerners will group a wooden bown and a silver bowl; easterners will group a wooden bowl and a wooden spoon. Westerners more likely to group items by rule, Easterners by similarity. Westerners are more likely to attribute human behavior to essential traits, Easterners to social context.
Some of the differences covered in the book are well-known — the individualism of the west, compared to eastern group identity. Western culture — particularly US culture — thrives on debate, while East Asian cultures value harmony.
The book seems naive at times — ancient Chinese images of bucolic scenes are taken as typical of Chinese life, rather than as conventional subjects of art, produced (I don’t know, but guessing) for the wealthy. The book makes broad-brush assumptions about how East Asians are content with the hierarchical structures of their societies, an assumption that’s falsifiable with the barest minimal familiarity with literature.
The most compelling evidence in the book was about low-level thought constructs that one might think are universal but aren’t.

California bans touch-screen voting

Last Friday, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all touch-screen voting machines in the State of California.
As Kim Vetter reported in Wired Magazine,

Counties will not be able to purchase any new e-voting machines unless the machines can produce a voter-verified paper trail that voters can use to authenticate that their vote was recorded accurately. This pushes up a previous deadline Shelley put forth in December when he mandated that all new voting machines purchased after June 2005 would have to produce a paper trail.

The last straw was the dodgy activity by Diebold (which serves El Paso County among others). In Kim Vetter’s words at Wired, “Diebold Election Systems made last-minute, untested changes to a device used with its AccuVote-TS and TSx voting machines. As a result of glitches, hundreds of polling places failed to open on time, disenfranchising voters who couldn’t cast ballots.” Secretary of State Shelley is referring Diebold to the Attorney General for the unauthorized upgrades.
The California decision was made after years of work by activists including Kim Alexander at Calvoter, and David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University, founder of Verified Voting educating state officials about the risks of non-verified voting.
We have a ways to go here in Texas. County and state officials are learning about voting system security. At a public hearing of the House Elections Committee, a county clerk testifed about the popularity of the Diebold system among voters. None of the state or county election administrators seemed concerned about the studies in the last year showing serious security flaws in these systems.
When presented with reports about evoting problems in other states, chairwoman Mary Denny declared that these stories were not relevant, because they did not happen in Texas. Imagine if Firestone tires self-destructed in California, and Texas officials said that the evidence wouldn’t be relevant unless the tires exploded here in Texas.
This means we have more education to do here. But the trend nationwide is in the right direction.

Identification — on or off?

Jon Udell contends that we’re hard-wired to recognize other humans:

Humans are hardwired to recognize faces, voices, gaits. We do it always and automatically. Perhaps so automatically that we don’t notice, for the most part, that we are doing it. When my teenage daughter comes downstairs there’s rarely any ambiguity about who she is.

Jon is disagreeing with David Weinberger, who says that identification defaults to off:

In the real world, we don’t identify everyone. We only identify those about whom we have doubts that we have to resolve for some purpose. Identifying is not the default in the real world. Nor, IMO, should it be online.

They’re both right. We instinctively recognize other people — nod to neighbors, chitchat with baristas, and identify those we know well by the smallest of gestures.
But we don’t ask for deep ID until its necessary. The social protocol for data is progressive disclosure. When do you learn someone’s street address? Their home town? Their salary? The default is to start shallow, and to get deeper with trust.
Computers are literal-minded critters. Knowing hair color and HIV status is all the same to them.
Perhaps identification defaults to on, but disclosure defaults to off.

Topic is a pheremone

Sebastien Paquet and Phil Pearson have written a paper about Internet Topic Exchange, a service they built that enables weblog posts to be shared among open groups in the form that we call topic channels. After nearly a year of operation, more than 200 topic channels have been created; several of them have been very active and have brought together many participants.
Now, with the discussion a while back about emergence, one might think that this was about the coalescing of knowledge; the growth of collections of text like termite mounds.
For the metaphor to hold, it implies the following about termite biology — that the instinct that draws termites to move grains of sand into a pile are different from the patterns that cause them to build structures with passageways and rooms dedicated to various purposes. (I don’t know this to be true, seems logical, references to relevent genetic ethology welcome).
Topics serve as pheremones — people are drawn together by the “smell” of a common interest. It takes an entirely different set of skills to shape those interests into shared meanings, to weave the individuals into a group, to build those shared interest into shared artifacts and actions.

If I had a digital camera

I’d take a picture of the roses that are blooming on the rosebush, the small forest of thriving grass that was mowed in the backyard, which was a muddy desert last winter, (fortunately, the grass in the front yard goes dormant over the winter), and the little white flowers whose names I forget, on the backyard bushes.
I wish I had a gardening mentor who would stop by once a season, give a few tips that I could do and digest, and come back again. Would happily trade for semi-pro editing, career counselling, or dinner.