On the morning that today's Irish Times announced that our health service minister is seeking a further 900Meuro reduction in the 14,000Meuro health budget, our deputy prime minster ("Tanaiste") Mary Coghlan announced a further 45Meuro investment in three large national science research centres.
I'm waiting for the reaction from certain public chat-show hosts on our national media: "how is it morally justifiable to spend 45Meuro when it would appear that the crisis in our accident and emergency units in our hospitals is about to severely deepen ?"
Let's see. 45Meuro would buy 560 return flights to Florida on the Government Gulfstream for the Minister of Health and her colleagues; or almost 5,000 return first class transatlantic airtrips for the CEO of a major Irish agency - funded by the taxpayer; or over a 1,000,000 pay-per-view private in-hotel movies for the executives of a major Irish agency - funded by the taxpayer; or 90,000 gifts (glass barometers) for a serving senior Minister - from taxpayers funds. And, as an afterthought perhaps, the investment is worth 228,000 attendances at accident and emergency units in Irish hospitals; or 69,000 in-patient bed days at Irish hospitals; or about just 35% of the cost of a failed and written-off national payroll system for our health service.
The 45Meuro invested today in world class scientific research is a serious moral choice. We can invest in science, or we can partially reduce cut backs in our public services. The consequential responsibility on our science research leaders is onerous. The three centres receiving funding today have already demonstrated impactful advances not just on the standard of scientific research in Ireland, but also to the potential economic and social benefits to Ireland - and indeed humanity at large.
Dr Fergus Shanahan's APC team have already produced world class leadership in the understanding, and the consequential application of, of the complex microbiology and pharmabiotics of the human intestine. The global benefits of pro-biotic food additives are largely due to their outstanding work.
One of the potential benefits of nanotechnology research is the highly targetted delivery of drug payloads to any specific part of the body. Today's delivery of drugs in the human body is akin to the military carpet bombing of world war two: one can appreciate the benefits if we could deliver drugs within the body as clinically as today's military smart weapon delivery systems. The CRANN team, hosted at TCD by John Boland, have much opportunity here and it is perhaps surprising that SFI have apparently not yet focussed more on the biomedical opportunities of nanotechnology research.
Dr Stefan Decker and his team at the DERI project (disclosure: I am on the technical advisory board) in Galway are focussed on enabling computers to really understand the deep complexity of human languages and nuances. If computers can learn to understand the semantics of human communication, then one of the many outcomes can be not just better web search engines, but better web based harmonisation engines which can reconcile what you already know with what you might not know. The opportunities to advance human understanding - by leveraging what is already known by across both today's, but also yesterday's, humanity, rather than forgetting or re-discovering what is in fact already known elsewhere or previously in history - are breathtaking.
But there are also other major centres in Ireland. Declaring a personal interest as the Chair of its governance board, the CTVR centre is globally unique in exploiting a great untapped natural resource, which we are extremely fortunate to have here in Ireland: the airwaves - the 'electro-magnetic spectrum' - which are unsaturated in Ireland, and thus a wonderful opportunity for very advanced new communication technologies. The BDI centre is researching very rapid diagnosis and self-test of medical conditions by non-invasive (e.g. saliva, sweat, blood pinpricks) sampling. The REMEDI centre is researching advanced stem cell research from adult humans.
All of this research, conducted in Ireland, is incredibly impressive. Furthermore, Irish scientific diaspora have returned, and Ireland is acting as a magnet for other nationals to undertake world class research here. The quality, and quantity, of high profile, globally widely-cited scientific papers, and of patents, has increased dramatically.
For me, one of the most exciting consequences has been the proliferation of cross-disciplinary and inter-institutional research amongst our young researchers and principal investigators, despite perhaps our long standing traditional hostility and open competition that all too often has hitherto corrupted some of the more established and senior talent in our universities (as I wrote here). There are clear opportunities for further collaboration between the universities in Ireland supported at the highest level.
But I remain concerned.
I remain concerned, because in my own view, the Irish state agencies - and in particular Science Foundation Ireland - have insufficiently focussed on the opportunity to translate world class research undertaken in Ireland into innovative products and services for the global market. In my view, Science Foundation Ireland is myopically focussed on Science: but what we also need - perhaps need even more - is a focus on Engineering. Ireland needs to take the most interesting scientific results globally available to engineer innovative new products and services for the world market.
I was surprised and concerned, for example, to learn that SFI reputedly believes that the work at REMEDI is overly focussed on commercial exploitation and industry linkage, rather than as SFI reputedly believes what is more nationally strategic basic research: this seems to me to in fact be the antithesis of what the small open Irish economy, with limited financial resources by global standards, actually needs. I am surprised and disappointed, that SFI does not have, and a senior executive has actually told me that it does not see the need for, a national showcase or centre for the outstanding scientific results which its sponsored researchers have already produced, and which are available for uptake by national and multi-national industry at large. I am surprised and disappointed that SFI sees no role in outreach to the Irish public to explain the importance of science in incidents like last week's national dioxin crisis, through a vehicle such as the Science Gallery (again a disclosure: for which I am chair). I am surprised and disappointed that SFI seems to think it can be just a shipyard launching ships, rather than an admiral not only building ships, but leading a complementary and mutually re-enforcing cohesive fleet to take on the world.
45Meuro is a lot of accident and emergency bed spaces. I absolutely know that the research teams receiving this funding feel the awesome national responsibility of the Irish taxpayer watching over them. But I am concerned that SFI is currently missing a much bigger picture than it currently seems able to see.
Wednesday 17 December 2008
Wednesday 3 December 2008
"You're not playing at Croker..."
Earlier this week, I had an article published in the monthly Innovation supplement of the Irish Times newspaper.
The general thrust of the article was the synergy between the multinationals present in Ireland, and the planned and unplanned benefits to the indigenous industry.
PS: "Croker", by the way, is the local name for Croke Park in Dublin, our national stadium for Gaelic football and hurling.
Monday 29 September 2008
Tigre Tico - Tico Tiger
Eva Paus, as far as I know, was the first to coin the term “Tico Tiger” in 2005 in her book subtitled “Can Costa Rica become Ireland ?” Richard Soley more recently resurrected the term when he suggested I use it as the title of a talk I gave this week in San Jose, Costa Rica, “Experiencias del Tigre Celta para el Tigre Tico”. “Tico”, by the way, is a form of endearment which Costa Ricans use colloquially to refer to each other as natives of their country, perhaps as we in Ireland sometimes call ourselves “paddies”.
I first met Richard just about 20 years ago, in Brussels at an annual ESPRIT conference. Pretty soon thereafter, when I was an academic in Trinity College, together with IONA co-founder Annrai O’Toole, I collected Richard from an OMG meeting in the height of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland and drove him across the border down to Dublin to give an invited talk on the OMG in Trinity. Richard regularly reminds me, and did so again last week when I met him, of our three passports – American, Irish, and British – being scrutinised at length by gun toting teenagers in army fatigues – apparently employed by the British Army – at the heavily fortified border crossing with the Republic. I think he was quite shocked, actually.
I was in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, last week to give an invited talk on the experiences and some lessons, from my personal perspective, of drama of the Celtic Tiger. The talk itself was on Thursday evening last, to the Club de Investigacion – run by Roberto Sasso – whose members consist primarily of senior executives from end user organisations throughout Costa Rica. Via Roberto, I also met the Minister for Foreign Trade, Marco Vinicio Ruiz and separately, the chief executive of CINDE – the equivalent of the Irish IDA.
It was my first visit to Costa Rica. I had heard of course of its astonishing natural beauty and lush green landscapes, as well as its extraordinary Caribbean and Pacific coastlines. However, I had not realised it was such a geothermally active region, with 38 volcanoes. San Jose appeared reasonably clean, not very much litter, and not very much graffiti, at least in comparison to parts of Dublin! In a very surprising way, it reminded me of the extraordinary beauty of the countryside of Rwanda, which I visited earlier this year, with luxurious forests and vegetation, lurking volatile summits, wonderful animals in natural habitat (e.g, gorillas in Rwanda, jaguar in Costa Rica..), low rise red tiled and silver corrugated roofed homes and buildings, and extraordinarily warm and generous people. I was fortunate enough to be taken, and to have a clear view for at least ten minutes, of the crater of Poas volcano , 2,800 metres high and about a 2 hour (uphill!) drive from San Jose. On the way down, I also visited the La Paz hotel gardens, with a wonderful track through native rain forest and damply intimate to a series of four spectacular waterfalls. Some of my own photos are here. It is the rainy season at the moment, and on Friday afternoon I experienced the heaviest and darkest monsoon cloud in my life: over 12 cm of rain gushed over San Jose in just a few hours. Everyone seemed to take it in their stride, and said it was routine and would probably rain as heavily the next day. And I thought we had had a wet summer in Ireland, but this was something else..
The democratic institutions of Costa Rica are interesting, and ones from which we in Ireland and in other countries, might appreciate. The President and elected members of parliament have four year terms. Since the 1949 Constitution, a member of parliament can only seek re-election after sitting out one term, ie after a four year participation in parliament, a further four years must pass before he/she can seek re-election! In the case of the President, eight years must pass before he/she can seek re-election. In my view, this philosophy ensures that politicians have an opportunity to stay more aware of ordinary society than some of the long term career politicians which we have in this country. The current president, Oscar Arias Sanchez, is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, after his work helping end civil wars elsewhere in Latin America. The next elections will be in February 2010.
In 1948, Costa Rica disbanded its armed forces, and has no military forces and no military drain on the public finances. There has been no civil war since 1948, unlike some of the neighbouring countries. There is a public security force, currently with a small number of aircraft and helicopters, for general law enforcement, border patrol, anti-narcotic activities, and rescue.
The Costa Rican economy has been growing fairly steadily, at about 7% in 2007. It has a high standard of living relative to its neighbours about a per capita income of about U.S. $5,800 (and approximately double that on purchasing power parity – PPP – terms), and an unemployment rate of 4.6%. Consumer price inflation has been consistent at about 10% for the last decade. Both the central government and the overall public sector ran fiscal surpluses in 2007.
Costa Rica’s economy has been driven by eco-tourism (particularly from the USA, Canada and Spain) and agriculture, and in particular organically grown coffee, flowers, bananas, pineapples and strawberries, with Dole and Chiquita. However more recently Intel Corporation is established in San Jose and employs over 2,000 people; Proctor and Gamble employs 1,200 people, and both Hospira and Baxter Healthcare add to the health care products industry. There are untapped (for environmental reasons) oil reserves off the Atlantic coast. 90% of electrical power is generated by hydro-electric units, and all fossil fuels are imported - in Ireland, well over 90% of our electricity generation is by contrast from fossil fuels. Surprisingly, in Costa Rica there are not yet any geo-thermal units [actually there is one so far, and I stand corrected since the original version of this posting - see Ignacio Trejos's comment below], and it would seem that Costa Rica has ample opportunity to become a net exporter of electricity, based on its natural hydro and geo-thermal resources.
In the school system, the Government has given tax breaks for the purchase of computers, and many schools are fully equipped. Programming has become part of the entire school agenda. Turning to the software industry, the Microsoft evangelist in the region, whom I met, has done an excellent job for his company: all school students leave school not only with a good grounding in Office tools, but also as at least Visual Basic programmers. There is very little Java competency. The quality of programming capabilities in the young adult population is high. There are today about 80 independent software vendors, many of them however small, exporting in total approximately 200M US$ worth of services and products.
The Club de Investigacion is having its 20th anniversary year. It has recently published a digital strategy for Costa Rica, as part of a national drive improve productivity and to triple income per capita by 2021. It is available in English here and covers the major themes of productivity in the economy; education; and transparency in government institutions.
Next year, the OMG will celebrate its 20th anniversary year, and its June meeting will be hosted in Costa Rica. The OMG was highly influential on the development of IONA, and as a one time Board member of the OMG, I hope to be there to join in the celebrations of the longest global standards organisation in the software industry.
Twenty years of Club de Investigacion, and almost 20 years of the OMG. Reflecting back to 1988 and 1989, I do not believe any of us would have anticipated the rise of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland just a few years later.
I wonder what the next twenty years will bring for the Tico Tiger..
I first met Richard just about 20 years ago, in Brussels at an annual ESPRIT conference. Pretty soon thereafter, when I was an academic in Trinity College, together with IONA co-founder Annrai O’Toole, I collected Richard from an OMG meeting in the height of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland and drove him across the border down to Dublin to give an invited talk on the OMG in Trinity. Richard regularly reminds me, and did so again last week when I met him, of our three passports – American, Irish, and British – being scrutinised at length by gun toting teenagers in army fatigues – apparently employed by the British Army – at the heavily fortified border crossing with the Republic. I think he was quite shocked, actually.
I was in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, last week to give an invited talk on the experiences and some lessons, from my personal perspective, of drama of the Celtic Tiger. The talk itself was on Thursday evening last, to the Club de Investigacion – run by Roberto Sasso – whose members consist primarily of senior executives from end user organisations throughout Costa Rica. Via Roberto, I also met the Minister for Foreign Trade, Marco Vinicio Ruiz and separately, the chief executive of CINDE – the equivalent of the Irish IDA.
It was my first visit to Costa Rica. I had heard of course of its astonishing natural beauty and lush green landscapes, as well as its extraordinary Caribbean and Pacific coastlines. However, I had not realised it was such a geothermally active region, with 38 volcanoes. San Jose appeared reasonably clean, not very much litter, and not very much graffiti, at least in comparison to parts of Dublin! In a very surprising way, it reminded me of the extraordinary beauty of the countryside of Rwanda, which I visited earlier this year, with luxurious forests and vegetation, lurking volatile summits, wonderful animals in natural habitat (e.g, gorillas in Rwanda, jaguar in Costa Rica..), low rise red tiled and silver corrugated roofed homes and buildings, and extraordinarily warm and generous people. I was fortunate enough to be taken, and to have a clear view for at least ten minutes, of the crater of Poas volcano , 2,800 metres high and about a 2 hour (uphill!) drive from San Jose. On the way down, I also visited the La Paz hotel gardens, with a wonderful track through native rain forest and damply intimate to a series of four spectacular waterfalls. Some of my own photos are here. It is the rainy season at the moment, and on Friday afternoon I experienced the heaviest and darkest monsoon cloud in my life: over 12 cm of rain gushed over San Jose in just a few hours. Everyone seemed to take it in their stride, and said it was routine and would probably rain as heavily the next day. And I thought we had had a wet summer in Ireland, but this was something else..
The democratic institutions of Costa Rica are interesting, and ones from which we in Ireland and in other countries, might appreciate. The President and elected members of parliament have four year terms. Since the 1949 Constitution, a member of parliament can only seek re-election after sitting out one term, ie after a four year participation in parliament, a further four years must pass before he/she can seek re-election! In the case of the President, eight years must pass before he/she can seek re-election. In my view, this philosophy ensures that politicians have an opportunity to stay more aware of ordinary society than some of the long term career politicians which we have in this country. The current president, Oscar Arias Sanchez, is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, after his work helping end civil wars elsewhere in Latin America. The next elections will be in February 2010.
In 1948, Costa Rica disbanded its armed forces, and has no military forces and no military drain on the public finances. There has been no civil war since 1948, unlike some of the neighbouring countries. There is a public security force, currently with a small number of aircraft and helicopters, for general law enforcement, border patrol, anti-narcotic activities, and rescue.
The Costa Rican economy has been growing fairly steadily, at about 7% in 2007. It has a high standard of living relative to its neighbours about a per capita income of about U.S. $5,800 (and approximately double that on purchasing power parity – PPP – terms), and an unemployment rate of 4.6%. Consumer price inflation has been consistent at about 10% for the last decade. Both the central government and the overall public sector ran fiscal surpluses in 2007.
Costa Rica’s economy has been driven by eco-tourism (particularly from the USA, Canada and Spain) and agriculture, and in particular organically grown coffee, flowers, bananas, pineapples and strawberries, with Dole and Chiquita. However more recently Intel Corporation is established in San Jose and employs over 2,000 people; Proctor and Gamble employs 1,200 people, and both Hospira and Baxter Healthcare add to the health care products industry. There are untapped (for environmental reasons) oil reserves off the Atlantic coast. 90% of electrical power is generated by hydro-electric units, and all fossil fuels are imported - in Ireland, well over 90% of our electricity generation is by contrast from fossil fuels. Surprisingly, in Costa Rica there are not yet any geo-thermal units [actually there is one so far, and I stand corrected since the original version of this posting - see Ignacio Trejos's comment below], and it would seem that Costa Rica has ample opportunity to become a net exporter of electricity, based on its natural hydro and geo-thermal resources.
In the school system, the Government has given tax breaks for the purchase of computers, and many schools are fully equipped. Programming has become part of the entire school agenda. Turning to the software industry, the Microsoft evangelist in the region, whom I met, has done an excellent job for his company: all school students leave school not only with a good grounding in Office tools, but also as at least Visual Basic programmers. There is very little Java competency. The quality of programming capabilities in the young adult population is high. There are today about 80 independent software vendors, many of them however small, exporting in total approximately 200M US$ worth of services and products.
The Club de Investigacion is having its 20th anniversary year. It has recently published a digital strategy for Costa Rica, as part of a national drive improve productivity and to triple income per capita by 2021. It is available in English here and covers the major themes of productivity in the economy; education; and transparency in government institutions.
Next year, the OMG will celebrate its 20th anniversary year, and its June meeting will be hosted in Costa Rica. The OMG was highly influential on the development of IONA, and as a one time Board member of the OMG, I hope to be there to join in the celebrations of the longest global standards organisation in the software industry.
Twenty years of Club de Investigacion, and almost 20 years of the OMG. Reflecting back to 1988 and 1989, I do not believe any of us would have anticipated the rise of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland just a few years later.
I wonder what the next twenty years will bring for the Tico Tiger..
Saturday 20 September 2008
ArtBots at the Science Gallery
I remember once in Trinity when I was an engineering student having a long and isolated evening trying to argue a case that there is beautiful art in software programming – and in all engineering disciplines – with a skeptical but distinguished professor of history and fellow humanities students. I explained that software can be incredibly wonderful architected, but of course only the cognoscente – ie software developers, but not mere mortals – can appreciate so. But on the other hand most mere mortals can appreciate the visual arts, good music and literature even if they have not had specialist training. I came away glad I had a flame suit, but it was a fun tease anyway.
The Science Gallery focuses on the confluence of science and technology with art and discovery. This weekend we are hosting ArtBots – the Robot Talent Show, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. I went along to the opening last night – it was pretty busy – and really enjoyed some of the more artistic entrants.
On walking in, you are met by Rubot II, which was a centre of attraction for many of the teenagers there, and impressive if not particularly artistic. But close to Rubot, you can hear and see what a 6 metre length of vibrating and oscillating steel band looks like in the Storm and 6 Bands. I really liked the Rechnender Raum, an inverted dynamic machine in which its computations are sent to its centre. What Is It Without The Hand That Wields It was little gruesome, weeping blood every time a player was injured in Counter-Strike Source. I really liked Gossamer-1 with the intricate patterns it layered in response to the ambient sounds in the exhibit.
Ray Lee gave an astonishing orchestral performance of robotic music entitled Force Field as he conducted, and played virtual instruments. By moving his hands – air guitar like – he could pluck strings, play chords, and assemble a rhythmical cacophony of harmonies and melodies – quite amazing. Unfortunately however his only concert was last night, and so if you missed it, well you’ll have to wait until next time.
There are fifteen exhibits altogether, together with play areas where you can build your own robots. Entrance, as is our policy is free. On the flip side, the exhibition is only running this weekend and finishes tomorrow evening: we have to meet the costs of having the exhibitor engineers and artists be with us in Dublin.
So, if you are in Dublin this weekend, do hop on the DART and go explore the show. Its great to be able to show the public that there is art in software, science and engineering :-)..
-
Postscript: some photos from the show are here.
The Science Gallery focuses on the confluence of science and technology with art and discovery. This weekend we are hosting ArtBots – the Robot Talent Show, as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. I went along to the opening last night – it was pretty busy – and really enjoyed some of the more artistic entrants.
On walking in, you are met by Rubot II, which was a centre of attraction for many of the teenagers there, and impressive if not particularly artistic. But close to Rubot, you can hear and see what a 6 metre length of vibrating and oscillating steel band looks like in the Storm and 6 Bands. I really liked the Rechnender Raum, an inverted dynamic machine in which its computations are sent to its centre. What Is It Without The Hand That Wields It was little gruesome, weeping blood every time a player was injured in Counter-Strike Source. I really liked Gossamer-1 with the intricate patterns it layered in response to the ambient sounds in the exhibit.
Ray Lee gave an astonishing orchestral performance of robotic music entitled Force Field as he conducted, and played virtual instruments. By moving his hands – air guitar like – he could pluck strings, play chords, and assemble a rhythmical cacophony of harmonies and melodies – quite amazing. Unfortunately however his only concert was last night, and so if you missed it, well you’ll have to wait until next time.
There are fifteen exhibits altogether, together with play areas where you can build your own robots. Entrance, as is our policy is free. On the flip side, the exhibition is only running this weekend and finishes tomorrow evening: we have to meet the costs of having the exhibitor engineers and artists be with us in Dublin.
So, if you are in Dublin this weekend, do hop on the DART and go explore the show. Its great to be able to show the public that there is art in software, science and engineering :-)..
-
Postscript: some photos from the show are here.
Thursday 18 September 2008
Building Cathedrals from Bazaars
I wrote this as part of my work for Cloudsmith. It is a follow up of my earlier posting a few weeks ago.
In summary, Cloudsmith lets you browse and find useful bundles of software components which work together – software playlists – and then download ones of interest. Each one can contain components from different software repositories, and Cloudsmith knows where to go, and how to get to them.
--
Eric S. Raymond wrote a seminal paper in 1997, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, contrasting how Linux emerged from a loosely structured, highly collaborative community or "bazaar" with the traditional approach to developing software (open source or proprietary), in which a select group of cathedral-builders controlled every aspect of design and technology.
Most engineers strive to build at least one great “building” during their career, a monument, a shrine, and a testament to their skill. Today, even "cathedrals" are made from parts found at the bazaars - a huge and growing marketplace for open source components, in which thousands of developers promote parts that many other developers combine into new products. The output of many bazaars -- projects and communities such as the Eclipse Foundation, the Apache Foundation, Google Code, SourceForge, etc. - support and publish the efforts of component development teams. Popular components turn up in multiple bazaars, sometimes as identical copies, other times with subtle variations.
Among the challenges development teams, and their co-worker product management and product marketing teams, face when operating within this new ecosystem are:
* What range of components is currently available? Which bazaars have them; what is their status and quality; how popular are they; where can updates and fixes be found; and so on.
* What works with what? What components, and combinations of components, are available? How do the pieces all fit together, and which bazaars have them?
* How popular is this combination of components compared to that alternative one? How do we know when and if we should update a selection of components, as new versions of the constituent parts emerge?
* How can we build playlists which combine components we built ourselves, with components found in public bazaars and that change in ways we don't control? How can we move to the new version of a public component without breaking what we already have? And how can we keep what we found in the bazaar from getting so intertwined with what we built that we can no longer separate them? What is the best strategy to manage change, when your organisation and your team are increasingly mixing public software components with your proprietary assets?
* Who is going to support us when we use some unique combination which we assembled from public bazaars? Is there anyone out there doing something similar we can learn from?
* We fix and extend components we find in the bazaar, and sometimes create entirely new component playlists of our own. How do we share our work with other developers in our organisation or (assuming our corporate policy allows it) contribute things back to the bazaar for the public good? And assuming we've shared it, how do we know who is using it, and for what?
It is, of course, no longer just an issue of providing a stable, managed foundation on which you and your colleagues can build. There is heightened corporate awareness reaching all the way to the audit committees of publicly quoted companies, due to the multiplicity of software licensing policies. The issue of knowing if, when and how public software assets are being used inside a corporation has become a high concern.
The ability to tailor software should be its value rather than its risk. But in todays world, isn't software componentisation paradoxically slower than it could be, precisely due to the changes, improvements and proliferation offered by the community?
Eric Raymond describes how extremely useful software can result from open collaboration, despite the absence of a clear lead architect directing the project. Today’s software repositories illustrate this principle on a grand scale - they are collections of really good and useful components developed, published, maintained and extended, sometimes by individuals and sometimes by organized teams of collaborators, in a process that can seem almost anarchic compared to conventional internal development.
As bazaars of developed, and contributed, software components have matured, the complexity of fitting together appropriate combinations have increased, as has ensuring that things do not break as each component is maintained.
One example is Eclipse, which is a common integration platform for many components. The recent Ganymede release lists nine application frameworks, six toolsets for embedded and device development, six toolsets for enterprise development, five language IDEs, and five aspects of its rich client platform. All of these elements, in principle, can be used in any combination of choice, although there are seven different official Ganymede packages are listed. Forty-five additional different project downloads are listed. And nine different distributions from member organisations are promoted. It shows an impressive level of community momentum and collective activity, but which of all of the alternatives do you really need for your particular project?
Actually, it is even more complex, because each bazaar stacks up components from its own shelves with components it finds in other bazaars. And you are often building not just one cathedral, but several based on a common set of blueprints. Perhaps you want to develop using Seam rich client Java toolkit? Then you might need a playlist of the Eclipse Classic IDE, JBoss Tools, Seam Core, JBoss AS, and PostgreSQL (with thanks to Stefan Daume for suggesting this particular playlist). But to do so, you may need to visit the Eclipse, JBoss, Seam and Postgres bazaars to put this all together -- unless you can happen to find somebody else who has already done this for you. If you want to build an email spam filter, then maybe a playlist of MySQL, qpsmtpd, my qpsmtpd custom modules, php pages (status), and open flash chart run-time files might be just the job (with thanks to Bjorn Freeman-Benson for this playlist).
Finding out what software components are available is a modest challenge: you can use raw Google, or Google CodeSearch, or Koders, or Krugle, or Codase, or something similar. The more significant challenge is finding out what works with what else to form a useful playlist; then how to get hold of the right version of each these pieces from each of the right bazaars concerned; how popular is this specific playlist of components; and how to get notified if any of the pieces are subsequently changed. If you want to be civic-minded, you might also want to find out how best to contribute original or derivative works back to the remainder of your organisation or community at large.
Our industry is maturing: we really soon should reach the equivalent levels of professional practice as our colleagues in other engineering disciplines, such as electronics hardware and civil engineering. There now is - perhaps at long last - a substantial number of re-usable, well-engineered, components available to all of us, being extended and improved on a daily basis. We should all be able to build cathedrals, and other artifacts, from the components we find. But the vast range of components, coupled with the fluidity of material - software - with which to work, has presented our industry with some new challenges,and which are not as apparent in other engineering disciplines.
In summary, Cloudsmith lets you browse and find useful bundles of software components which work together – software playlists – and then download ones of interest. Each one can contain components from different software repositories, and Cloudsmith knows where to go, and how to get to them.
--
Eric S. Raymond wrote a seminal paper in 1997, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, contrasting how Linux emerged from a loosely structured, highly collaborative community or "bazaar" with the traditional approach to developing software (open source or proprietary), in which a select group of cathedral-builders controlled every aspect of design and technology.
Most engineers strive to build at least one great “building” during their career, a monument, a shrine, and a testament to their skill. Today, even "cathedrals" are made from parts found at the bazaars - a huge and growing marketplace for open source components, in which thousands of developers promote parts that many other developers combine into new products. The output of many bazaars -- projects and communities such as the Eclipse Foundation, the Apache Foundation, Google Code, SourceForge, etc. - support and publish the efforts of component development teams. Popular components turn up in multiple bazaars, sometimes as identical copies, other times with subtle variations.
Among the challenges development teams, and their co-worker product management and product marketing teams, face when operating within this new ecosystem are:
* What range of components is currently available? Which bazaars have them; what is their status and quality; how popular are they; where can updates and fixes be found; and so on.
* What works with what? What components, and combinations of components, are available? How do the pieces all fit together, and which bazaars have them?
* How popular is this combination of components compared to that alternative one? How do we know when and if we should update a selection of components, as new versions of the constituent parts emerge?
* How can we build playlists which combine components we built ourselves, with components found in public bazaars and that change in ways we don't control? How can we move to the new version of a public component without breaking what we already have? And how can we keep what we found in the bazaar from getting so intertwined with what we built that we can no longer separate them? What is the best strategy to manage change, when your organisation and your team are increasingly mixing public software components with your proprietary assets?
* Who is going to support us when we use some unique combination which we assembled from public bazaars? Is there anyone out there doing something similar we can learn from?
* We fix and extend components we find in the bazaar, and sometimes create entirely new component playlists of our own. How do we share our work with other developers in our organisation or (assuming our corporate policy allows it) contribute things back to the bazaar for the public good? And assuming we've shared it, how do we know who is using it, and for what?
It is, of course, no longer just an issue of providing a stable, managed foundation on which you and your colleagues can build. There is heightened corporate awareness reaching all the way to the audit committees of publicly quoted companies, due to the multiplicity of software licensing policies. The issue of knowing if, when and how public software assets are being used inside a corporation has become a high concern.
The ability to tailor software should be its value rather than its risk. But in todays world, isn't software componentisation paradoxically slower than it could be, precisely due to the changes, improvements and proliferation offered by the community?
Eric Raymond describes how extremely useful software can result from open collaboration, despite the absence of a clear lead architect directing the project. Today’s software repositories illustrate this principle on a grand scale - they are collections of really good and useful components developed, published, maintained and extended, sometimes by individuals and sometimes by organized teams of collaborators, in a process that can seem almost anarchic compared to conventional internal development.
As bazaars of developed, and contributed, software components have matured, the complexity of fitting together appropriate combinations have increased, as has ensuring that things do not break as each component is maintained.
One example is Eclipse, which is a common integration platform for many components. The recent Ganymede release lists nine application frameworks, six toolsets for embedded and device development, six toolsets for enterprise development, five language IDEs, and five aspects of its rich client platform. All of these elements, in principle, can be used in any combination of choice, although there are seven different official Ganymede packages are listed. Forty-five additional different project downloads are listed. And nine different distributions from member organisations are promoted. It shows an impressive level of community momentum and collective activity, but which of all of the alternatives do you really need for your particular project?
Actually, it is even more complex, because each bazaar stacks up components from its own shelves with components it finds in other bazaars. And you are often building not just one cathedral, but several based on a common set of blueprints. Perhaps you want to develop using Seam rich client Java toolkit? Then you might need a playlist of the Eclipse Classic IDE, JBoss Tools, Seam Core, JBoss AS, and PostgreSQL (with thanks to Stefan Daume for suggesting this particular playlist). But to do so, you may need to visit the Eclipse, JBoss, Seam and Postgres bazaars to put this all together -- unless you can happen to find somebody else who has already done this for you. If you want to build an email spam filter, then maybe a playlist of MySQL, qpsmtpd, my qpsmtpd custom modules, php pages (status), and open flash chart run-time files might be just the job (with thanks to Bjorn Freeman-Benson for this playlist).
Finding out what software components are available is a modest challenge: you can use raw Google, or Google CodeSearch, or Koders, or Krugle, or Codase, or something similar. The more significant challenge is finding out what works with what else to form a useful playlist; then how to get hold of the right version of each these pieces from each of the right bazaars concerned; how popular is this specific playlist of components; and how to get notified if any of the pieces are subsequently changed. If you want to be civic-minded, you might also want to find out how best to contribute original or derivative works back to the remainder of your organisation or community at large.
Our industry is maturing: we really soon should reach the equivalent levels of professional practice as our colleagues in other engineering disciplines, such as electronics hardware and civil engineering. There now is - perhaps at long last - a substantial number of re-usable, well-engineered, components available to all of us, being extended and improved on a daily basis. We should all be able to build cathedrals, and other artifacts, from the components we find. But the vast range of components, coupled with the fluidity of material - software - with which to work, has presented our industry with some new challenges,and which are not as apparent in other engineering disciplines.
Friday 12 September 2008
Why is Engineering not taught by Professional Engineers ?
I was asked to give a keynote speech earlier this week at the International Manufacturing Conference 2008, DIT.
I was perhaps (deliberately :-)) a little controversial and I had to wear my flame suit when responding to the Q&A afterwards, not least because sone of the audience were academics in Irish engineering schools, but not professional engineers!
If you have any views on this topic, please do post a comment.
Best
Chris
--
I speak to you today as the current Senior Vice President of Engineers Ireland, the professional body for engineers in this country. I will have the honour next year of serving my year as President.
I am an electronics engineer, graduating from a four year undergraduate programme in 1978. My first three years were spent in general engineering topics, and I chose to specialize in electronics only in my final year. So, I put my credentials in front of you ladies and gentlemen, and admit that I only have a hazy recollection of my lectures and tutorials in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, applied mathematics, instrumentation and control, and so on....
So, in coming to you today I thought I ought to prepare myself by browsing the internet and trying to understand what are the current issues, opportunities and challenges facing you in the Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering professions today. Googling, I found myself reading current and back issues of magazines not only of our own Engineers Journal, but also of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Forgive me, but I was initially a little taken aback! I read a number of viewpoints which suggested that the West is losing manufacturing competencies and capacity to the emerging economies of the East, and in particular of China. If I were a potential student of manufacturing engineering, I might think that the future held little hope for me unless I emigrated to Guangdong, Zhejiang, Hebei or somewhere else in China!! Now personally, I really enjoy visiting that country and have done so regularly for some years – indeed I was the founding Chairman of the Ireland China Association back in 2001 – and frankly, if I were a younger professional starting my career I would seriously think of emigrating there. But I’m not convinced that many Leaving Certificate students would necessarily agree with me, and still less their parents. But some of your colleagues in your discipline seem to be strongly suggesting that there is no career future in manufacturing engineering unless one moves East.
It got worse. I came across another article, suggesting perhaps that we are seeing the imminent demise of mechanical engineering. In the good old days, a manufacturing plant was driven off a central power shaft spanning the longitudinal axis of the factory, with various gears and belts driving machinery at each station. In the good old days, cars, trucks and locomotives had central powertrains, gearboxes and hydraulic fluids controlling the power and torque from the power plant to the wheels. But nowadays, the electrical and electronic engineers are apparently winning and, using high power semiconductor gates, large amounts of electrical power can be delivered and minutely controlled, with extreme precision, in ways that can only make mechanical engineers drool! Most modern aircraft, including in particular the entire Airbus family, use fly by wire rather than fly by mechanical linkage. All new cars soon may not have drive shafts and gears boxes: the power will be delivered using cables via all electric drive chains, with microprocessors making sense of it all:: Your garage mechanic will need to become a garage electrician!
But then, I was relieved to find counter-points of view, observing how both manufacturing and mechanical engineering are evolving. Composite materials are driving new applications, not least in the biomedical domain for prosthetics. Manufacturing engineering has evolved into systems integration and product integration, harnessing a diverse set of emerging, disruptive technologies to yield innovative and exciting products. Scales are continuing to shrink, and minimization of both mass and energy are a common objective. Smart, intelligent materials with their own embedded controllers are not uncommon. Kinematicians lead efforts in unraveling protein folding, essential to genomics, proteomics and DNA scaffolding. Thermal engineering is becoming more and more critical: I am aware of the truly excellent work being done by Jeff Punch and his team in the University of Limerick in this regard, in particular in the domain of thermal stabilization of photonic lasers for telecommunications applications, in the context of my chairmanship of the CTVR national project in telecommunications.
In fact, as reputedly one wag stated: it’s no longer about “M”anufacturing engineering. It’s no longer about “M”echanical engineering. The “M” denotes something else: today it is about Multi-disciplinary engineering.
I fervently support this view. In my own career with computers and software, my industry not only changes its technologies, but also rapidly changes its perspective as new applications appear. A professional engineer today, regardless of his or her background, must have a multi-disciplinary philosophy. That has two complementary aspects: the intra-engineering and external. Multi-discipline, in the intra-engineering sense, implies an understanding and training across multiple engineering specializations, understanding the application of mathematical and scientific results to civil, mechanical, electrical, electronic, software, manufacturing engineering, and so on. By the external multi-disciplinary aspect, I mean the ability to discuss articulately with line of business managers, product marketing, corporate marketing, corporate lawyers, human resource professionals, and of course financial analysts.
But today, forgive me, in this country, I wonder have our colleagues in our engineering academies – both universities and institutes of technology – lost the plot ? One of their concerns I guess – and I speak as a past university lecturer – is the usually desperate quest to achieve recognition by their peer academics in other departments across the rest of the organisation. As an engineering department struggles to achieve recognition, and of course financial resources, amongst perhaps stronger groups in the pure sciences, the medics, the department of law, the business studies department, all of the various departments of humanities and so on, there is a natural tendency to play the game: “publish or perish”. And in publishing, and researching, more and more esoteric niched topics are addressed, in which one may have a reasonable chance of obtaining international recognition as an accomplished researcher but in what may be a very narrow field indeed.
However a consequence of this may be a tendency to over-specialise undergraduate courses. In a national market in Ireland, where there are few enough Leaving Certificate students obtaining honours standards in mathematics – which of course is the usual standard for entrance into courses leading to professional engineering accreditation – does it really make sense to have proliferation of undergraduate courses ? Let me give you some idea, from the list of undergraduate courses nationwide which are accredited by Engineers Ireland as giving a foundation to become a Member of our organization: Chemical and Process Engineering; Electronic Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Microelectronic Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Materials Engineering; Process Engineering; Process and Chemical Engineering; Structural Engineering; Civil Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Civil, Structural and Environment Engineering; Manufacturing Engineering; Production Engineering; Computer-Aided and Manufacturing Engineering; Industrial Engineering and Information Systems; Aeronautical Engineering; Digital Media Engineering; Information and Communication Engineering; Manufacturing Engineering with Business Studies; Mechatronic Engineering; Medical Mechanical Engineering; Biosystems Engineering; Computer Engineering; Building Services Engineering; Agricultural and Food Engineering. I know that all the academics involved in offering this wonderful diversity are sincere in their disciplines, but isn’t it time we stood back and asked ourselves is there a better way to help students select Engineering as a profession ? And ensure that they have a very solid, multi-disciplinary approach to Engineering as a profession ? And leave at least some of the specialization, when and as necessary, to their continued professional development during their career ?
Let me change tack, and give you another concern which I have. If one of my family ever were to pursue a career in surgery, I and they would expect to learn from practicing surgeons. If I were ever to take lessons to become an aircraft pilot, I would like lessons from a qualified professional pilot. In my business career, whenever requiring professional legal or financial advice, I have sought the necessary qualified professional individuals.
And so, if any of my family pursue an Engineering career – and one of my sons is studying Engineering – I would expect, and they expect, to be taught by professionals. Professional Engineers.
In preparing today’s talk, I browsed the web sites of the Irish universities and institutes offering those courses I alluded to above, and examined the credentials of the academics of the various engineering departments concerned – at least, as published on their web sites. It was very very interesting, and I encourage you to try the exercise yourself.
For example: one department: six full time academic staff, only one of them – the head of Department – listed C.Eng. as amongst his accomplishments. Another: four academics, no C.Eng listed. Another: twenty academics, one Fellow, four C.Engs. And so on.
Now there are many PhDs. And a few Professors. But why so few Chartered Engineers (or Fellows) ? I suspect that perhaps the various web pages aren’t always accurate, and C.Eng qualifications aren’t always listed. However, that in turn is indicative: why would an Engineering academic not be much more proud of the fact that he or she was a Chartered Engineer, or Fellow, and advertise that fact, ahead of being a Dr. or Professor ??...
In the medical profession, a simple Mr, Ms or Mrs as a title commands great respect: the individual in question is likely to be a highly qualified surgeon or consultant, rather than a simple General Practitioner Doctor, or an esoteric academic Professor. A highly qualified practitioner gains respect. Why are our own Engineering academics not as proud of practical professional experiences ? Why is it acceptable to have a non Chartered Engineer teaching professional engineering ? Should it be acceptable ? Why do engineering departments not insist on a C.Eng. recruitment policy, and why do they not demand that their younger staff achieve C.Eng. status as rapidly as possible, if necessary ahead of achieving professorial status ? Why do our engineering students not question – no, demand – that the majority of their teaching comes from professional engineers ?
Ladies and Gentlemen, let me remind you or advise you if you have not already heard, that Engineers Ireland has taken the decision that from 2013 in Ireland, it will be necessary to have achieved a Masters level of education, over five years, in order to become a Chartered Engineer, from the current position where a four year accredited undergraduate degree is sufficient. While thus bringing us into line with many of our international colleagues, the change is also an opportunity for us to consider the structure staffing, and directions of our academic engineering programmes.
Thank you for your time this morning, and my opportunity to address you. Let me leave you with a summary: if we are going to attract more people to a wonderful and exciting career in professional engineering, then we ourselves must become even more professional in our education. We need to stress a multi-disciplinary approach, re-visit our thinking about premature specialization, and ensure that as many of our instructors as possible have professional engineering qualifications.
I was perhaps (deliberately :-)) a little controversial and I had to wear my flame suit when responding to the Q&A afterwards, not least because sone of the audience were academics in Irish engineering schools, but not professional engineers!
If you have any views on this topic, please do post a comment.
Best
Chris
--
I speak to you today as the current Senior Vice President of Engineers Ireland, the professional body for engineers in this country. I will have the honour next year of serving my year as President.
I am an electronics engineer, graduating from a four year undergraduate programme in 1978. My first three years were spent in general engineering topics, and I chose to specialize in electronics only in my final year. So, I put my credentials in front of you ladies and gentlemen, and admit that I only have a hazy recollection of my lectures and tutorials in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, applied mathematics, instrumentation and control, and so on....
So, in coming to you today I thought I ought to prepare myself by browsing the internet and trying to understand what are the current issues, opportunities and challenges facing you in the Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering professions today. Googling, I found myself reading current and back issues of magazines not only of our own Engineers Journal, but also of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Forgive me, but I was initially a little taken aback! I read a number of viewpoints which suggested that the West is losing manufacturing competencies and capacity to the emerging economies of the East, and in particular of China. If I were a potential student of manufacturing engineering, I might think that the future held little hope for me unless I emigrated to Guangdong, Zhejiang, Hebei or somewhere else in China!! Now personally, I really enjoy visiting that country and have done so regularly for some years – indeed I was the founding Chairman of the Ireland China Association back in 2001 – and frankly, if I were a younger professional starting my career I would seriously think of emigrating there. But I’m not convinced that many Leaving Certificate students would necessarily agree with me, and still less their parents. But some of your colleagues in your discipline seem to be strongly suggesting that there is no career future in manufacturing engineering unless one moves East.
It got worse. I came across another article, suggesting perhaps that we are seeing the imminent demise of mechanical engineering. In the good old days, a manufacturing plant was driven off a central power shaft spanning the longitudinal axis of the factory, with various gears and belts driving machinery at each station. In the good old days, cars, trucks and locomotives had central powertrains, gearboxes and hydraulic fluids controlling the power and torque from the power plant to the wheels. But nowadays, the electrical and electronic engineers are apparently winning and, using high power semiconductor gates, large amounts of electrical power can be delivered and minutely controlled, with extreme precision, in ways that can only make mechanical engineers drool! Most modern aircraft, including in particular the entire Airbus family, use fly by wire rather than fly by mechanical linkage. All new cars soon may not have drive shafts and gears boxes: the power will be delivered using cables via all electric drive chains, with microprocessors making sense of it all:: Your garage mechanic will need to become a garage electrician!
But then, I was relieved to find counter-points of view, observing how both manufacturing and mechanical engineering are evolving. Composite materials are driving new applications, not least in the biomedical domain for prosthetics. Manufacturing engineering has evolved into systems integration and product integration, harnessing a diverse set of emerging, disruptive technologies to yield innovative and exciting products. Scales are continuing to shrink, and minimization of both mass and energy are a common objective. Smart, intelligent materials with their own embedded controllers are not uncommon. Kinematicians lead efforts in unraveling protein folding, essential to genomics, proteomics and DNA scaffolding. Thermal engineering is becoming more and more critical: I am aware of the truly excellent work being done by Jeff Punch and his team in the University of Limerick in this regard, in particular in the domain of thermal stabilization of photonic lasers for telecommunications applications, in the context of my chairmanship of the CTVR national project in telecommunications.
In fact, as reputedly one wag stated: it’s no longer about “M”anufacturing engineering. It’s no longer about “M”echanical engineering. The “M” denotes something else: today it is about Multi-disciplinary engineering.
I fervently support this view. In my own career with computers and software, my industry not only changes its technologies, but also rapidly changes its perspective as new applications appear. A professional engineer today, regardless of his or her background, must have a multi-disciplinary philosophy. That has two complementary aspects: the intra-engineering and external. Multi-discipline, in the intra-engineering sense, implies an understanding and training across multiple engineering specializations, understanding the application of mathematical and scientific results to civil, mechanical, electrical, electronic, software, manufacturing engineering, and so on. By the external multi-disciplinary aspect, I mean the ability to discuss articulately with line of business managers, product marketing, corporate marketing, corporate lawyers, human resource professionals, and of course financial analysts.
But today, forgive me, in this country, I wonder have our colleagues in our engineering academies – both universities and institutes of technology – lost the plot ? One of their concerns I guess – and I speak as a past university lecturer – is the usually desperate quest to achieve recognition by their peer academics in other departments across the rest of the organisation. As an engineering department struggles to achieve recognition, and of course financial resources, amongst perhaps stronger groups in the pure sciences, the medics, the department of law, the business studies department, all of the various departments of humanities and so on, there is a natural tendency to play the game: “publish or perish”. And in publishing, and researching, more and more esoteric niched topics are addressed, in which one may have a reasonable chance of obtaining international recognition as an accomplished researcher but in what may be a very narrow field indeed.
However a consequence of this may be a tendency to over-specialise undergraduate courses. In a national market in Ireland, where there are few enough Leaving Certificate students obtaining honours standards in mathematics – which of course is the usual standard for entrance into courses leading to professional engineering accreditation – does it really make sense to have proliferation of undergraduate courses ? Let me give you some idea, from the list of undergraduate courses nationwide which are accredited by Engineers Ireland as giving a foundation to become a Member of our organization: Chemical and Process Engineering; Electronic Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Microelectronic Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Materials Engineering; Process Engineering; Process and Chemical Engineering; Structural Engineering; Civil Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Civil, Structural and Environment Engineering; Manufacturing Engineering; Production Engineering; Computer-Aided and Manufacturing Engineering; Industrial Engineering and Information Systems; Aeronautical Engineering; Digital Media Engineering; Information and Communication Engineering; Manufacturing Engineering with Business Studies; Mechatronic Engineering; Medical Mechanical Engineering; Biosystems Engineering; Computer Engineering; Building Services Engineering; Agricultural and Food Engineering. I know that all the academics involved in offering this wonderful diversity are sincere in their disciplines, but isn’t it time we stood back and asked ourselves is there a better way to help students select Engineering as a profession ? And ensure that they have a very solid, multi-disciplinary approach to Engineering as a profession ? And leave at least some of the specialization, when and as necessary, to their continued professional development during their career ?
Let me change tack, and give you another concern which I have. If one of my family ever were to pursue a career in surgery, I and they would expect to learn from practicing surgeons. If I were ever to take lessons to become an aircraft pilot, I would like lessons from a qualified professional pilot. In my business career, whenever requiring professional legal or financial advice, I have sought the necessary qualified professional individuals.
And so, if any of my family pursue an Engineering career – and one of my sons is studying Engineering – I would expect, and they expect, to be taught by professionals. Professional Engineers.
In preparing today’s talk, I browsed the web sites of the Irish universities and institutes offering those courses I alluded to above, and examined the credentials of the academics of the various engineering departments concerned – at least, as published on their web sites. It was very very interesting, and I encourage you to try the exercise yourself.
For example: one department: six full time academic staff, only one of them – the head of Department – listed C.Eng. as amongst his accomplishments. Another: four academics, no C.Eng listed. Another: twenty academics, one Fellow, four C.Engs. And so on.
Now there are many PhDs. And a few Professors. But why so few Chartered Engineers (or Fellows) ? I suspect that perhaps the various web pages aren’t always accurate, and C.Eng qualifications aren’t always listed. However, that in turn is indicative: why would an Engineering academic not be much more proud of the fact that he or she was a Chartered Engineer, or Fellow, and advertise that fact, ahead of being a Dr. or Professor ??...
In the medical profession, a simple Mr, Ms or Mrs as a title commands great respect: the individual in question is likely to be a highly qualified surgeon or consultant, rather than a simple General Practitioner Doctor, or an esoteric academic Professor. A highly qualified practitioner gains respect. Why are our own Engineering academics not as proud of practical professional experiences ? Why is it acceptable to have a non Chartered Engineer teaching professional engineering ? Should it be acceptable ? Why do engineering departments not insist on a C.Eng. recruitment policy, and why do they not demand that their younger staff achieve C.Eng. status as rapidly as possible, if necessary ahead of achieving professorial status ? Why do our engineering students not question – no, demand – that the majority of their teaching comes from professional engineers ?
Ladies and Gentlemen, let me remind you or advise you if you have not already heard, that Engineers Ireland has taken the decision that from 2013 in Ireland, it will be necessary to have achieved a Masters level of education, over five years, in order to become a Chartered Engineer, from the current position where a four year accredited undergraduate degree is sufficient. While thus bringing us into line with many of our international colleagues, the change is also an opportunity for us to consider the structure staffing, and directions of our academic engineering programmes.
Thank you for your time this morning, and my opportunity to address you. Let me leave you with a summary: if we are going to attract more people to a wonderful and exciting career in professional engineering, then we ourselves must become even more professional in our education. We need to stress a multi-disciplinary approach, re-visit our thinking about premature specialization, and ensure that as many of our instructors as possible have professional engineering qualifications.
Wednesday 27 August 2008
Software Playlists
I wrote the text below as part of a whitepaper on Cloudsmith – you may find it interesting to read through.
In summary, Cloudsmith lets you browse and find useful bundles of software components which work together – software playlists – and then download ones of interest. Each one can contain components from different software repositories, and Cloudsmith knows where to go, and how to get to them.
I did a few short (approx. 4 mins each) youtube videos to help you. The first one (sorry for the mug shot..) shows you how to browse and download a playlist in Cloudsmith; the second, how you can publish your own playlist, or distro, of interesting software and share it with everyone else, if you want to; and the third, how you can tell Cloudsmith about new software components available which it doesn’t already know about.
Have fun.
Meanwhile, here’s some motivation for why we put Cloudsmith together…..
Douglas McIlroy for the NATO conference on software engineering in Germany in 1968:
"Software components (routines), to be widely applicable to different machines and users, should be available in families arranged according to precision, robustness, generality and time-space performance.
Existing sources of components - manufacturers, software houses, users' groups and algorithm collectors - lack the breadth of interest or coherence of purpose to assemble more than one or two such families, yet software production in the large would be so enormously helped by the availability of spectra of high quality routines, quite as mechanical design is abetted by the existence of families of structural shapes, screws and resistors.
We undoubtedly get the short end of the stick in confrontations with hardware people because they are industrialists, and we are the crofters. Software production today appears in the scale of industrialization somewhere below the more backward construction industries."
Some forty years later, some cynics may argue that we software people are still crofters compared to our peers in other disciplines of engineering. However, there is considerable progress, at the technology level, for component based engineering applied to the software industry: modern programming environments such as Java, C#, Ruby, Perl, etc; modern development environments such as Eclipse and XCode; and emerging runtime environments such as OSGi. Likewise there are repositories of software components online at Eclipse, Apache, Sourceforge, and Tigris, as well as many others. Discovering what software components are available is a modest challenge: you can use raw Google, or source code searchers such as Google CodeSearch, Koders, Krugle, Codase, or some such. Competency and skills across a development organisation can be accelerated by understanding how different components have been used together by architects and experienced developers.
However, the momentum behind component based software paradoxically is not without problems. Many developers make contributions, and it can be difficult to clearly see the gems against the morass of activity. Software appears inherently unstable. Problems are found, bugs are fixed, extensions are made, and patches released. When the industry as a whole is increasingly adopting componentization, when components are supplied by third parties, and are upstream in the component “supply chain”, there is a serious risk of accelerating instability.
It can take hours, or even longer, to deduce dependencies between components (whether open or closed source); to copy folders; to pack; to download; to then unpack; to establish deployment targets, and all the sundry other activities needed to actually successfully build a system and get it to work. It is not uncommon for the skills involved to be concentrated on a very small number of key “build” or “configuration” developers, whose loss from an organization would could serious concern and vulnerability.
Following other engineering disciplines to componentization should be “a good thing” as McIlroy argues: but can we do more to enhance confidence and accountability ?
The momentum behind software components is resulting in increasingly less pre-packaging by specific suppliers and aggregators, and increasingly more tailoring by both suppliers and consumers. There is some analogy with developments in the music industry. In 1968, when McIlroy made his comments at the NATO conference, and even as recently as the start of this decade, music distribution companies and their contracted artists sold pre-packaged songs as albums: an album was distributed as a complete image printed onto some distribution media - an LP record, tape, CD or DVD - and the selection of songs it contained was pre-determined by the supplier. Software vendors have been doing something similar.
Today, while such music albums are still available, it is more common for the public to download individual songs and tunes from online repositories and stores such as iTunes. Further, anyone can package together a selection of songs and tunes which they believe form an interesting juxtaposition, as a playlist. A favorite playlist may be shared with friends and others, enabling them to download and also listen to the same selection.
A playlist can be part of another, forming a larger collection. iTunes v3 introduced automatic updating of playlists, based on ratings, popular plays, keyword tags and play counts. The playlist concept has been extended to videos and photograph selections.
Software playlists are a new concept, introduced by Cloudsmith. A software playlist identifies a set of software components which can be usefully used together. Given a playlist, its constituent components can be automatically downloaded from their respective public or, as appropriate, proprietary software repositories and materialised onto a target machine. The publisher of a playlist - a company, or an individual - asserts that the specific components are mutually compatible, and usage and other metrics can confirm this. An example of a playlist, from Stefan Daume, might be a foundation for using the Seam rich client Java toolset and so list the combination of specific compatible versions of the Eclipse Classic IDE, JBoss Tools, Seam Core, JBoss AS, and PostgreSQL required to obtain the Seam environment.
Software playlists are an excellent way to encourage standard configurations and environments. Corporate “favorite” playlists, containing only approved executable binaries and libraries, can be enforced where appropriate. To the extent that playlists are shared in public (on the internet), different alternative configurations can quickly be appraised and compared for popularity and ubiquity. Software adoption trends across the industry can be monitored, and the stability of new releases can be tracked.
Changes to specific software playlists can also be monitored. Notifications can be received, for example, by using an RSS feed whenever one of the underlying components is updated. Equally, notifications can be received whenever a software playlist is in turn incorporated and nested inside another playlist: this can be one measure of adoption and ubiquity, akin to citation scores for top scientific papers and to pagerank algorithms.
In a software development environment, public software playlists can provide valuable information on configurations found useful by other organizations and developers. A well defined (evidently stable and popular) playlist can save wasted time and effort, otherwise need to find workable configurations of different versions of various components.
Inside the corporate firewall, private (ie to the corporation) playlists can be built from a mixture of proprietary software components from internal repositories, and from public components if appropriate. Playlists overcome the vulnerability of configuration skills being limited to a very small group of core developers and builders.
Software playlists can be a mechanism for describing a specific tailored configuration from a customer back to a software supplier, under a suitable support contract. They can also be a way for a vendor to release updates and patches in a limited distribution to appropriate customers.
The components – the “tunes” – within a software playlist need not be limited to executable modules and libraries. A software component can also be source code, or a test script, or documentation, or a presentation – in fact any soft copy of any information. A software playlist can, for example, describe the executable software, tutorials, exercises and class notes necessary for a particular training course. A prospective student – or the individual responsible for preparing a class room for a course – can then pre-load the material necessary for the course, from the playlist, and thus avoid time wastage for configuration activities during the course itself.
We have built and offer Cloudsmith to the global software community as a service to help find, assemble, load and track software artifacts, described by software playlists, as well as to help to encourage the construction of new ones.
Cloudsmith is a repository for software playlists: it contains information about components, but not the components themselves. Cloudsmith is thus not a software component repository, but augments them. Software playlists can be easily constructed from others, and from those software components known to Cloudsmith. Publishing; sharing or protecting; finding and searching for; downloading and “materializing” components for; and monitoring the popularity and quality of software playlists are all simple, easily-learnt, point-and-click, activities. Playlists are named, grouped into folders, and can be given keyword tags. Playlists can be shared amongst a specified set of users, or made generally public. All the components necessary for a specific playlist can be materialized and installed in a specific machine, as a single mouse click – and such “cloudlinks” can be shared via, for example, email or blogs. Versioning compatibility and specific machine environment differences can be automatically managed.
Public software component repositories, such as Eclipse, Apache, Sourceforge, Maven and Tigris, are largely already mapped by Cloudsmith, and so the components therein can be easily added into playlists. Cloudsmith understands all common industry versioning and meta-information formats for software repositories and build systems. Extending the map with further repositories, including private ones (for example inside a firewall), is straight forward. Components from private repositories can be restricted to private playlists for limited groups of users.
In a similar way, the Cloudsmith web site is a publicly accessible resource. When using public assets together with private ones, it is a common requirement to place key proprietary assets within your corporate firewall. We thus also provide private Cloud servers, which operate on a corporate intranet and co-operate with the main public Cloudsmith web site. A private Cloudserver can thus complement a private software repository.
Software components openly shared and accessible across the internet are changed (by third parties) in ways that sometimes may appear unpredictable, and perhaps even unwarranted from the perspective of your own use of them. By contrast, private software assets inside the corporate firewall can be managed and have their life cycles carefully controlled. A private Cloudserver can provide a useful interface to couple private and public assets, ensuring that specific versions and updates to public assets are only adopted inside the corporation within the firewall in a managed way.
A private Cloudserver can also serve as the "site of record" for the adoption and consumption of public software assets across an organisation. By using working via corporate software playlists on a private Cloudserver, rather than allowing the direct consumption of publicly available software components, the degree to which public assets are used can be controlled and monitored. This in turn can not just provide stability for software engineering activities, but also greatly assist verification and audit processes necessary for good governance and IP management.
Douglas McIlroy stated, back in 1968:
"Existing sources of components - manufacturers, software houses, users' groups and algorithm collectors - lack the breadth of interest or coherence of purpose to assemble more than one or two such families, yet software production in the large would be so enormously helped by the availability of spectra of high quality routines, quite as mechanical design is abetted by the existence of families of structural shapes, screws and resistors."
Today, there is a substantial spectra of software components on a global scale, and many of high quality.
The challenge now is to understand which software components work well with which others, and then how to understand and manage those configurations.
In summary, Cloudsmith lets you browse and find useful bundles of software components which work together – software playlists – and then download ones of interest. Each one can contain components from different software repositories, and Cloudsmith knows where to go, and how to get to them.
I did a few short (approx. 4 mins each) youtube videos to help you. The first one (sorry for the mug shot..) shows you how to browse and download a playlist in Cloudsmith; the second, how you can publish your own playlist, or distro, of interesting software and share it with everyone else, if you want to; and the third, how you can tell Cloudsmith about new software components available which it doesn’t already know about.
Have fun.
Meanwhile, here’s some motivation for why we put Cloudsmith together…..
Douglas McIlroy for the NATO conference on software engineering in Germany in 1968:
"Software components (routines), to be widely applicable to different machines and users, should be available in families arranged according to precision, robustness, generality and time-space performance.
Existing sources of components - manufacturers, software houses, users' groups and algorithm collectors - lack the breadth of interest or coherence of purpose to assemble more than one or two such families, yet software production in the large would be so enormously helped by the availability of spectra of high quality routines, quite as mechanical design is abetted by the existence of families of structural shapes, screws and resistors.
We undoubtedly get the short end of the stick in confrontations with hardware people because they are industrialists, and we are the crofters. Software production today appears in the scale of industrialization somewhere below the more backward construction industries."
Some forty years later, some cynics may argue that we software people are still crofters compared to our peers in other disciplines of engineering. However, there is considerable progress, at the technology level, for component based engineering applied to the software industry: modern programming environments such as Java, C#, Ruby, Perl, etc; modern development environments such as Eclipse and XCode; and emerging runtime environments such as OSGi. Likewise there are repositories of software components online at Eclipse, Apache, Sourceforge, and Tigris, as well as many others. Discovering what software components are available is a modest challenge: you can use raw Google, or source code searchers such as Google CodeSearch, Koders, Krugle, Codase, or some such. Competency and skills across a development organisation can be accelerated by understanding how different components have been used together by architects and experienced developers.
However, the momentum behind component based software paradoxically is not without problems. Many developers make contributions, and it can be difficult to clearly see the gems against the morass of activity. Software appears inherently unstable. Problems are found, bugs are fixed, extensions are made, and patches released. When the industry as a whole is increasingly adopting componentization, when components are supplied by third parties, and are upstream in the component “supply chain”, there is a serious risk of accelerating instability.
It can take hours, or even longer, to deduce dependencies between components (whether open or closed source); to copy folders; to pack; to download; to then unpack; to establish deployment targets, and all the sundry other activities needed to actually successfully build a system and get it to work. It is not uncommon for the skills involved to be concentrated on a very small number of key “build” or “configuration” developers, whose loss from an organization would could serious concern and vulnerability.
Following other engineering disciplines to componentization should be “a good thing” as McIlroy argues: but can we do more to enhance confidence and accountability ?
The momentum behind software components is resulting in increasingly less pre-packaging by specific suppliers and aggregators, and increasingly more tailoring by both suppliers and consumers. There is some analogy with developments in the music industry. In 1968, when McIlroy made his comments at the NATO conference, and even as recently as the start of this decade, music distribution companies and their contracted artists sold pre-packaged songs as albums: an album was distributed as a complete image printed onto some distribution media - an LP record, tape, CD or DVD - and the selection of songs it contained was pre-determined by the supplier. Software vendors have been doing something similar.
Today, while such music albums are still available, it is more common for the public to download individual songs and tunes from online repositories and stores such as iTunes. Further, anyone can package together a selection of songs and tunes which they believe form an interesting juxtaposition, as a playlist. A favorite playlist may be shared with friends and others, enabling them to download and also listen to the same selection.
A playlist can be part of another, forming a larger collection. iTunes v3 introduced automatic updating of playlists, based on ratings, popular plays, keyword tags and play counts. The playlist concept has been extended to videos and photograph selections.
Software playlists are a new concept, introduced by Cloudsmith. A software playlist identifies a set of software components which can be usefully used together. Given a playlist, its constituent components can be automatically downloaded from their respective public or, as appropriate, proprietary software repositories and materialised onto a target machine. The publisher of a playlist - a company, or an individual - asserts that the specific components are mutually compatible, and usage and other metrics can confirm this. An example of a playlist, from Stefan Daume, might be a foundation for using the Seam rich client Java toolset and so list the combination of specific compatible versions of the Eclipse Classic IDE, JBoss Tools, Seam Core, JBoss AS, and PostgreSQL required to obtain the Seam environment.
Software playlists are an excellent way to encourage standard configurations and environments. Corporate “favorite” playlists, containing only approved executable binaries and libraries, can be enforced where appropriate. To the extent that playlists are shared in public (on the internet), different alternative configurations can quickly be appraised and compared for popularity and ubiquity. Software adoption trends across the industry can be monitored, and the stability of new releases can be tracked.
Changes to specific software playlists can also be monitored. Notifications can be received, for example, by using an RSS feed whenever one of the underlying components is updated. Equally, notifications can be received whenever a software playlist is in turn incorporated and nested inside another playlist: this can be one measure of adoption and ubiquity, akin to citation scores for top scientific papers and to pagerank algorithms.
In a software development environment, public software playlists can provide valuable information on configurations found useful by other organizations and developers. A well defined (evidently stable and popular) playlist can save wasted time and effort, otherwise need to find workable configurations of different versions of various components.
Inside the corporate firewall, private (ie to the corporation) playlists can be built from a mixture of proprietary software components from internal repositories, and from public components if appropriate. Playlists overcome the vulnerability of configuration skills being limited to a very small group of core developers and builders.
Software playlists can be a mechanism for describing a specific tailored configuration from a customer back to a software supplier, under a suitable support contract. They can also be a way for a vendor to release updates and patches in a limited distribution to appropriate customers.
The components – the “tunes” – within a software playlist need not be limited to executable modules and libraries. A software component can also be source code, or a test script, or documentation, or a presentation – in fact any soft copy of any information. A software playlist can, for example, describe the executable software, tutorials, exercises and class notes necessary for a particular training course. A prospective student – or the individual responsible for preparing a class room for a course – can then pre-load the material necessary for the course, from the playlist, and thus avoid time wastage for configuration activities during the course itself.
We have built and offer Cloudsmith to the global software community as a service to help find, assemble, load and track software artifacts, described by software playlists, as well as to help to encourage the construction of new ones.
Cloudsmith is a repository for software playlists: it contains information about components, but not the components themselves. Cloudsmith is thus not a software component repository, but augments them. Software playlists can be easily constructed from others, and from those software components known to Cloudsmith. Publishing; sharing or protecting; finding and searching for; downloading and “materializing” components for; and monitoring the popularity and quality of software playlists are all simple, easily-learnt, point-and-click, activities. Playlists are named, grouped into folders, and can be given keyword tags. Playlists can be shared amongst a specified set of users, or made generally public. All the components necessary for a specific playlist can be materialized and installed in a specific machine, as a single mouse click – and such “cloudlinks” can be shared via, for example, email or blogs. Versioning compatibility and specific machine environment differences can be automatically managed.
Public software component repositories, such as Eclipse, Apache, Sourceforge, Maven and Tigris, are largely already mapped by Cloudsmith, and so the components therein can be easily added into playlists. Cloudsmith understands all common industry versioning and meta-information formats for software repositories and build systems. Extending the map with further repositories, including private ones (for example inside a firewall), is straight forward. Components from private repositories can be restricted to private playlists for limited groups of users.
In a similar way, the Cloudsmith web site is a publicly accessible resource. When using public assets together with private ones, it is a common requirement to place key proprietary assets within your corporate firewall. We thus also provide private Cloud servers, which operate on a corporate intranet and co-operate with the main public Cloudsmith web site. A private Cloudserver can thus complement a private software repository.
Software components openly shared and accessible across the internet are changed (by third parties) in ways that sometimes may appear unpredictable, and perhaps even unwarranted from the perspective of your own use of them. By contrast, private software assets inside the corporate firewall can be managed and have their life cycles carefully controlled. A private Cloudserver can provide a useful interface to couple private and public assets, ensuring that specific versions and updates to public assets are only adopted inside the corporation within the firewall in a managed way.
A private Cloudserver can also serve as the "site of record" for the adoption and consumption of public software assets across an organisation. By using working via corporate software playlists on a private Cloudserver, rather than allowing the direct consumption of publicly available software components, the degree to which public assets are used can be controlled and monitored. This in turn can not just provide stability for software engineering activities, but also greatly assist verification and audit processes necessary for good governance and IP management.
Douglas McIlroy stated, back in 1968:
"Existing sources of components - manufacturers, software houses, users' groups and algorithm collectors - lack the breadth of interest or coherence of purpose to assemble more than one or two such families, yet software production in the large would be so enormously helped by the availability of spectra of high quality routines, quite as mechanical design is abetted by the existence of families of structural shapes, screws and resistors."
Today, there is a substantial spectra of software components on a global scale, and many of high quality.
The challenge now is to understand which software components work well with which others, and then how to understand and manage those configurations.
Friday 4 July 2008
Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday
Friday, july 18th next is Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday.
In UNICEF Ireland, we’re celebrating his birthday by inviting everyone to send him a birthday card. We’re very grateful to the Sunday Times newspaper which next Sunday (6th) will be including a birthday postcard, which you can then use to fill out with a greeting, and post in to us. There are also a number of volunteers and retail outlets around
The Nelson Mandela Foundation has been a partner in the “Schools For Africa” campaign with UNICEF and the German philanthropist Peter Kramer, via his Hamburg Society for the Promotion of Democracy and International Law. Schools for Africa is catalyzing basic education across
I remember when I was a student studying in
In 1958, the ruling National Party in
Mandela was found guilty the following November of two charges, of inciting workers to illegally strike, and of leaving the country without valid documentation. He was subsequently charged in October 1963 under the Sabotage Act, which carried the death penalty. He conducted his own defence, and gave a lengthy, impassioned and widely reported speech to mitigate his sentence: he was sentenced to life imprisonment on the 12th June 1964.
In March 1980. the
Six weeks later, PW Botha resigned after friction with his cabinet colleagues. His successor, FW de Klerk, under pressure from international governments, but also calculating that the ANC was poorly organized and that he could form a winning alliance with conservative black organizations, lifted the ban on the ANC in February 1990, and released Mandela from prison on the 11th of that month.
In April 1994, during the first national, and fully democratic, elections, the ANC won a national majority and Mandela became president. However a year earlier, the grand-daughter-in-law of the instigator of apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd (remember him from above?..), Melanie Verwoerd, had been invited by Nelson Mandela to stand as a candidate in the first democratic elections in
Melanie today is the Executive Director of UNICEF here in
So, in honour of Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday, and due to Melanie’s initiative in celebrating the event, please fill out and post the birthday postcard, either physically via next Sunday’s Sunday Times, or virtually on the web.
Wednesday 25 June 2008
IONA
In those very early days, one of my mentors told me that the chief responsibility of a CEO to his staff is to improve the CV of each and every staff member during their tenure with the company.
It’s a principle I tried to uphold during my two terms, and 12 years, as CEO of IONA. I certainly don’t claim a 100% success rate, but I honestly feel very privileged to have worked with each IONAian over the years since 1991, and sincerely hope that each and every career immensely benefited as a result. There are, and have been, wonderful people at
When Software AG wrote a formal letter to the Chairman of IONA earlier this year, they triggered under Irish corporate law a lengthy and delicate process which has eventually resulted in today’s announcement. During the process, a large number of companies were contacted, which resulted in a shorter list of potential bidders. These included both trade companies, and private equity houses, who were then each invited to undertake detailed due diligence, including face to face meetings with the executive team and myself as a major shareholder and Board member.
Ultimately, a number of formal bids were made. The IONA Board, after careful consideration and detailed professional advice, have decided to recommend the Progress offer to our shareholders. Many factors weighed on that decision, heavily complicated by multitude of requirements under Irish, European and
I have known Joe Alsop for many years. I have no doubt that he feels the same responsibility I held when I was (twice) CEO, to improve the CV of each and every staff member during their service with the company.
I sincerely believe that there is a wonderful opportunity in the global enterprise middleware sector, and – assuming the deal is ultimately approved later this year - I fully encourage the combined Progress and
Wednesday 7 May 2008
Myanmar
The crisis in
I personally would concur with those who are concerned for human rights issues in
UNICEF has been on the ground in
When the structures of a civil society are weak, when poverty is widespread and governance leaves issues to be resolved, the need in an emergency is even greater.
Delay and procrastination will cause further, and avoidable, deaths in
In my view, it is irresponsible, morally inexcusable and potentially murderous to delay.
The leader of the Irish agency Goal made certain statements today broadcast nationwide in
But I am disappointed by the comments today from Goal, which frankly were ill-conceived, factually incorrect and morally dangerous.
If the Board of Goal really sincerely believes that the Government of Myanmar does not care for millions of its own people, can the Board and wonderful staff of Goal still nevertheless sleep comfortably at night just letting people die, when practical assistance is possible and desperately sought ?
What moral right can an aid organization justify telling the people of Ireland to deny the people of Myanmar, to not join with the international community in responding to the plea for help, and to instead just allow people to die in the aftermath of Nargis ?
Monday 3 March 2008
The Big Switch: book review
I wrote the following book review, by kind invitation, for the Irish Times Innovation supplement, and which was published today.
Nicholas Carr came to notoriety in 2003 for asserting that information technology no longer delivers a competitive edge. He claimed that although such technology is a prerequisite of any enterprise, it is no more so than electricity or telephones. Likewise, he argued, neither electricity, phones nor computer technology give competitive advantage, since everybody else has these too. Fortunately companies like Capital One, Southwest Airlines, Goldman Sachs,
His latest book, The Big Switch, is in two parts. The first gives a charming history of the electricity industry and some comparisons to the computer industry. For computer industry practitioners and technology historians alike, it is a light, interesting and innocuous read.
The second part is more significant. Carr bleakly observes complacency and naivety amongst internet advocates. Rather than the internet being a liberalizing force for global humanity or an empowerment away from governments and towards their peoples, Carr sees dangerous forces at work which may be concentrating power and immense wealth in a few fortunate individuals and in specific companies, as well as of course manipulation of populations by governments. Google comes in for particular attention, in the entire concluding chapter of the book. Carr discusses Google’s reputed quest to exploit artificial intelligence to the fullest by using the knowledge inherent in the world wide web, ultimately striving to be able to whisper answers and suggestions to any of our thoughts directly within our brains. God, Carr argues, has become the Great Programmer and the Universe is but the logical output of a computer.
Those concerned by privacy may be interested in Carr’s assertions that anonymous information and anonymised data can easily be overruled by inference automatically deduced through information culled from a small number of disparate sources. Those running businesses which rely on the internet may be interested in Carr’s observations on the fragility of the internet – as was exposed as recently as the start of this year by international sabotage in the Middle East,
Perhaps having forcibly laid down some portentous predictions, Carr might have suggested some alleviating actions. For example Carr asserts that everyone in the YouTube economy is free to play, but only very few reap the rewards; the erosion of the middle class may well accelerate, as the divide widens between a relatively small group of extraordinarily wealthy people – the digital elite – and a very large set of people who face eroding fortunes; and humanity is left with a prospect which is far from utopian. If computerization is really different from those past technological revolutions which helped close wealth gaps, then a discussion of actions or policies which might ameliorate the future would be insightful: but Carr appears reluctant to offer his wisdom.
People like Carr may be skeptical that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and they are equally dubious that it will promote greater harmony and understanding: instead they believe that cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation are as likely outcomes. If this is the case, then what should or could be done to improve things ? Do we trust that humans browsing the web can extract balanced judgments ? Should we – and what right do “we” have anyway – care about such issues, and should we make such judgments ? Should society encourage web content to be apolitical ? Old-timers like this reviewer will recall that commercial promotion using the internet once was ruled unacceptable by the community. Should our search engines attempt to tag argument with counter-argument ? Is there an opportunity to use the Web to aggregate and bundle (as in the traditional media, including for example this newspaper) and thus present balanced views, rather than the Great Unbundling which Carr perceives in the Web ? Should search engines be more circumspect about inferring our personal preferences as to our preferred content, and thus risk presenting content contrary to our individual prejudices ? Is the concept of a responsible, “public-service” search engine, useful and conceivable ? Certainly there is scope for reasoned discussion on improving upon or even avoiding the various outcomes for the Web which Carr discusses and predicts - but perhaps Carr is saving this for his follow-on tome “The Big Switch 2”.
This – in part two – is a dark book. It is characterized by sometimes nebulous extrapolation of certain trends and selected observations to assert sensational outcomes for the future of the internet and the web. Extreme positions and incitement to fear may no doubt generate some attention on the international speaking circuit. A more balanced and mature treatment is possible and arguably more responsible if, admittedly and almost certainly, less lucrative.
Monday 11 February 2008
LeCayla bought by OpSource
OpSource’s acquisition of LeCayla was announced today.
Conor Halpin and I met with OpSource in
In the end, acquisition by OpSource makes a lot of sense. LeCayla was already a customer of OpSource’s hosting solution, and both companies were thus aware of each other. OpSource has a vision of a complete SaaS delivery platform: not just basic hosting, but also valuable services such as analytics, visualization and now - via LeCayla - billing. OpSource brings a wider reach of deployed customers; LeCayla brings OpSource not only a well architected and proven self-service billing solution, but also an excellent engineering team and a business presence in
I have enjoyed working with Conor and the board of LeCayla, and sincerely wish the entire teams of OpSource and LeCayla not only success, but fun in achieving that success while working together.
Monday 28 January 2008
Rwanda
I spent last week in
It was my first visit to
In preparation for my trip, I had read Dervla Murphy’s own account of her visit in 1997, and I was very keen to see what changes had occurred since then.
The entire country is pristine. I saw no litter anywhere whatsoever, and no graffiti. Plastic bags are illegal, and I had been warned in advance that customs officials will confiscate them from your luggage on arrival. One Saturday morning each month, the entire nation – including its politicians – take part in community service, umuganda, which traditionally was a form of labour, as opposed to financial, tax: as I saw last Saturday morning, each community goes to work on maintaining the local paths, tracks, water infrastructure and so on.
The parallels with us here in
The population of
The five year term of Paul Kagame since 2003 has seen the economy grow 44% to 2.4Bn$ (2006 figure), with growth of 4.5%-6.5% expected for 2007. The incidence of HIV/AIDS in
Re-integration of society since the genocide of 1994 has clearly been painful and every citizen was affected by what happened. It was surreal to visit and have a drink in the bar of the Hotel des Mille Collines in central
On this particular trip, the focus was primarily on education (as opposed to e.g. HIV/AIDS for which I have visited other African nations before). UNICEF worldwide has a programme of what are called “child friendly schools” – a term which I personally find strange since it implies that other schools are “child unfriendly”, but there is a certain logic. Child friendly schools generally have better staff/student ratios, sports facilities, teacher training, re-integration of orphans and challenged children, and in particular are safe locations for girls – separate latrine facilities for example. Attendance rates, and completion rates, in child friendly schools are generally excellent. In
We visited both child friendly and as yet un-refurbished schools. A child friendly school is used as a centre point for a cluster of schools within a district, with teachers at the centre training those from the periphery. The contrast in terms of fit-out were obvious: concrete floors instead of mud; desks instead of benches; good sanitation and separate latrines; rain proof roofs; rain water collection tanks, and so on. The far better attendance by girls in child friendly schools was conspicuous as we visited classes.
We also visited child headed households, which I had experienced in Kwa-Zulu Natal and
Paul Kagame hosts a national childrens summit on an annual basis, over two days which are also nationally broadcast. Childrens issues are high on the national political agenda and UNICEF is a valuable partner.
For me, UNICEF is a wonderful organization and I occasionally surprise myself with deep awe, respect, sadness and hope – and yes, from time to time, tears. IMHO, to make a difference we really do need global organizations with scale and impact. UNICEF eradicated polio across the planet: I’m not convinced that many other organizations could have done this. It is not just about emergency relief but also about development of nations. I understand that a well known Irish national NGO has recently decided to cease any development activities and focus solely on emergency relief: while this is perhaps understandable given their limited scale, it has left projects abandoned with funding suddenly stopped, and with organizations like UNICEF then having to step in at short notice to pick up the shattered pieces. Development requires sustained, multi-year long term commitment: a “spray and pray” strategy is immature. Sometimes smaller NGOs suddenly abandon a country, as a response to strife, and in some cases – despicably – pull out their white staff, leaving other staff to their fate: UNICEF continues for example in Kenya and indeed Melanie Verwoerd, our UNICEF Ireland Director, had been in Kenya just the previous week – she was interviewed live from Kenya on the Gerry Ryan show amongst others. Sometimes, as an emergency relief response, smaller NGOs have difficulties working where they have no track record: at the time of the Asian tsunami in 2004, smaller NGOs reputedly turned up at
We visited, on our first morning, the Kigali Memorial Centre, where there are mass graves for 250,000 people. We laid three wreathes on the graves, and spent several hours inside the centre itself. Apart from the Rwandan story, including its impact on children, the remaining third of the centre is devoted to other genocides, including the Nazi and former
“In a search for a hideout, I found Jerome, his legs cut off. I could not leave him in this state. I tried to lift up Jerome so that we could leave together, but the car of the commune stopped near me. It was full of machetes and other instruments of death. I lay Jerome down on the ground and ran because a man got out of the burgomaster’s car to kill me. He finished Jerome off. I saw this when I looked back to see if anyone had followed me. I will never forget the way Jerome’s face was filled with desperation. Whenever I think about it, I cry all day long.”
Eric, 13
In the spring of 1994, approximately one million Rwandans were brutally and savagely murdered. But, as the Memorial Centre says, what really happened was not a million murders but first of all, one extremely violent and brutal one. The loss of a beautiful human life. And then, another was done. And then, incredibly, a third. And then a fourth. And on and on and on, relentlessly, on over a million separate individual occasions.
PS: if you are really really interested, there are some photos here.
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