Richard P. Gabriel, “World’s Most Famous Third-Rate Computer Scientist”, OOPSLA, 2008/09/04 November 28, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: gabriel, oopsla
add a comment
As a welcome departure from conferences being totally predictable, Richard Gabriel discusses plans to hear about more speculative work, as well as alternative ways of building diverse conference archives.
Last year’s OOPSLA chair talks about some of the fringe (but important) activities at OOPSLA as well as exciting announcement coming for the Onward! sessions and Essays.
Dick also mentions his week-long workshop on photographing conferences and how he and colleagues came up with the idea and how it relates to OOPSLA.
John Ralston Saul, “Democracy, Citizenship and Sovereignty”, Parkland Institute, 2006/11/17 November 28, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: john ralston saul, parkland
add a comment
I’ve enjoyed read some of John Ralston Saul’s more philosophical works. I find his talks to be thought provoking … and very Canadian.
John Ralston Saul, author, essayist and philosopher, spoke at the Parkland Institute’s Tenth Annual Conference, on November 17, 2006 in Edmonton, Alberta.
A Companion of the Order of Canada, he is also Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France.
His 14 honorary degrees range from McGill and the University of Ottawa, to Herzen State Pedagogical University in St Petersburg, Russia.
Gregor Kiczales, “Research program”, OOPSLA 2008/09/02 November 23, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: kiczales, oopsla
add a comment
I had enjoyed a prior talk by Gregor Kiczales for OOPSLA 2007. In 2008, he spoke less about his own research, and more about the OOPSLA direction.
Gregor Kiczales, Research Program Chair for OOPSLA 2008, discusses the all important research program this year.
One of the long lasting value of OOPSLA is that it allows leading edge researchers to mind melt with industry engineers and managers.
Gregor realizes this important aspect
and has led the selection of a fantastic research program that will surely continue this tradition.
Juha Pekka-Tolvanen, “Domain-Specific Modeling”, ACM OOPSLA, 2007/08/27 November 16, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: domain-specific, modeling, oopsla, tolvanen
add a comment
I’ve been looking into more formal languages for modeling the domain of business. The software community understands languages, and that general-purpose languages may not always work.
Every application domain has its own language. It has vocabulary, rules, and constraints. Historically, we have written software by implementing these vocabulary terms, rules, and constraints in a “high-level language” such as C++ or Java, or using a modeling language such as UML.
What gets Juha Pekka-Tolvanen of MetaCase out of bed every morning is a desire to improve in a fundamental way the productivity of software developers. He draws inspiration from studies that show it possible to achieve 500% to 1000% improvements — not just in the speed of development, but also in the quality of the software produced.
At OOPSLA, Pekka-Tolvanen will lead the The 7th OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling, along with Jeffrey Gray (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Matti Rossi (Helsinki School of Economics), and Jonathan Sprinkle (University of California, Berkeley).
This workshop will share community experience using domain-specific modeling for software development. Among the topics of the workshop are experience reports from industry and academia, the creation of metamodel-based languages, novel approaches for code generation from domain-specific models, issues in supporting and maintaining systems built with DSMs, and tool support. Papers range from typical information technology domains to hard-core scientific areas such as nuclear physics and the simulation of chemical processes.
In this podcast, Juha joins Daniel Steinberg of DimSumThinking to talk about the process and benefits of creating domain-specific models, the results of last year’s workshop, and what is in store for this year’s workshop.
Ray Ison, “Systems”, Open University, 2008/08/27 November 16, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: open university, ray ison, systems
add a comment
Ray Ison is a well-known researcher in the systems community.
Professor Ray Ison talks about his work in the Systems group and his background in Australia.
The Communication and Systems website » General Podcast » Ray Ison talks Systems
Ray Ison was appointed Professor of Systems at the Open University in 1994. He is the third person to hold the established Chair in Systems since the founding of the Systems Department in 1970. Others to hold the chair were John Beishon and Derek Pugh.
Pattie Maes, “Meta-Objects for the World Around Us”, ACM OOPLSA, 2007/10/25 November 16, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: ooplsa, pattie maes
add a comment
Pattie Maes was one of the earlier researchers who came prominent about the time that the Internet started to boom.
The ooPSLA 2007 keynote series closed with Pattie Maes talking about Meta-Objects for the World Around Us. Her talk was a fitting bookend to Kiczales’s address in the morning, as Maes described ongoing work at the MIT Media Lab to make available all of the information available to people when they need it as they live their lives — “users” using data and services in context.
There is a huge amount of useful information available online about everything around us: the objects we handle, the people we meet and the places we frequent. However, to access this information we have to completely interrupt what we are doing and use a keyboard, mouse, and browser on either a computer or mobile phone. This tends to be very disruptive and time consuming, and as such we do not usually consult information relevant to our context while on the move. In this talk I will document a series of experiments underway at the MIT Media Laboratory that try to integrate relevant information and services more closely into a user’s physical environment, thereby allowing a user to combine the affordances of the digital and physical worlds in one and the same experience.
Fred Turner, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”, AfterTv, 2007/01/19 November 16, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: fred turner, stewart brand
add a comment
I follow Stewart Brand’s ongoing work, and keep an eye on people connected to his social network. This interview fills in the longer history of the intelligensia in Northern California.
What is the connection between the cold war establishment, the Sixties counterculture and cybercultural icons like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson?
According to Stanford University professor Fred Turner, the connections are intriguingly fecund. In his excellent new book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Turner shows how Stewart Brand’s libertarian cyberculture grew out of the Cold War defence military-industrial complex and then San Francisco’s hippie counterculture.
The end product, Turner says, is digital utopianism — an ideological idealism about computers now articulated by Silicon Valley companies such as Google.
Ian Ayres, “Super Crunchers and the Power of Data”, Econtalk, 2007/10/22 November 4, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: ian ayres, super crunchers
add a comment
Should decisions be based on data or judgement?
Ian Ayres of Yale University Law School talks about the ideas in his new book, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.
Ayres argues for the power of data and analysis over more traditional decision-making methods using judgment and intuition. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about predicting the quality of wine based on climate and rainfall, the increasing use of randomized data in the world of business, the use of evidence and information in medicine rather than the judgment of your doctor, and whether concealed handguns or car protection devices such as LoJack reduce the crime rate.
The podcast closes with a postscript by Roberts challenging the use of sophisticated statistical techniques to analyze complex systems.
Ayres on Super Crunchers and the Power of Data | EconTalk | Library of Economics and Liberty
Stephen Baker, “The Numerati: Marketing by the Numbers”, Marketing Edge, 2008/08/04 November 4, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: numerati, steven baker
add a comment
With increased instrumentation in devices, there’s a continual stream of data for marketers to analyze.
… The Numerati [is] by one of the most prolific journalists on social media platforms, Stephen Baker. He is a senior writer with Business Week ….
The premise of The Numerati is that as our lives are captured digitally with electronic transactions, web site surfing patterns, online commerce etc, we are building a behavior that can be quantified, analyzed, and predicted. It’s the predicted part that is the most intriguing to Baker. Baker interviewed dozens of researchers, scientists and mathematicians for the book.
Will all these numbers allow advertisers to become better providers of valuable information and products that meet your individual needs, instead of getting unwanted, generally constructed information-buckshot that might hit the target of an educated guess? Will algorithms of your behavior give insight into your humanness, predicate your next purchase, or who you will likely friend online?
Life, it turns out, is a numbers game, and Baker sheds light on how it became so in The Numerati. In this conversation, we also get him sharing ideas on how best to pitch him at Business Week. Also he highlights the key courses a journalist should take to improve their craft, namely statistics, economics, and be fluent in a foreign language, his is Spanish.
Bruno Frey, “Happiness: A Revolution in Economics”, MIT Press Podcast, 2008/06 November 4, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: bruno frey, economics, happiness
add a comment
The foundations of economics are in utility theory. Economists rarely discuss happiness.
Bruno S. Frey is the author of Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. Mr. Frey is Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich, Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Research Director of CREMA (Center for Research in Economics, Management, and the Arts). He is co-editor of Economics and Psychology: A Promising New Cross-Disciplinary Field (MIT Press, 2007).
Scott Rosenberg, “Dreaming in Code”, Get Illuminated, 2007/02/13 November 4, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: chandler, dreaming in code, osaf, scott rosenberg
add a comment
I’ve been watching the progress of the Chandler Project since almost its inception, because the people involved are worth monitoring. Having a journalist track the project over a long history provides learning about how good intentions can go right … or wrong.
In 2001, Mitch Kapor, the designer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started the Open Source Applications Foundation, or OSAF for short.
Kapor hired some of the most talented programmers and software designers around and went to work to create a new kind of personal information manager, code named Chandler.
In 2003, Scott Rosenberg, the cofounder of Salon, asked Kapor if he could embed himself in OSAF for the purposes of writing a book about the development of the application. For three years, Rosenberg sat in on company meetings, met with programmers and designers, and observed the progress, or more accurately, lack of progress, of Chandler. Rosenberg’s book Dreaming in Code: Two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software, examines why making good software is so hard.
Dreaming in Code is addictively good reading. Rosenberg tells the story of the smart people at OSAF and why they can’t seem to gain traction with Chandler, even though they were veterans of other successful projects at places like Mozilla and Apple. Rosenberg also examines the larger picture of software development, recounting episodes in the history of computer science that add insight and context to the main story.
Robert Frank “Economics Education and the Economic Naturalist”, Econtalk, 2007/10/15 November 4, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: economic naturalist, robert frank
add a comment
Basic economics education is often theory-heavy, with abstract examples. Working from concrete examples in real life can provide greater relevance even to novice students.
Author Robert Frank of Cornell University talks about economic education and his recent book, The Economic Naturalist.
Frank argues that the traditional way of teaching economics via graphs and equations often fails to make any impression on students.
In this conversation with host Russ Roberts, Frank outlines an alternative approach from his new book, where students find interesting questions and enigmas from everyday life. They then try to explain them using the economic way of thinking.
Frank and Roberts discuss a number of the enigmas and speculate on the future of economics and education. The topics discussed include tuxedos vs. wedding dresses, the level of civility (or lack thereof) in New York City, the difference between vending machines for soda and newspapers, the tragedy of the commons, and the economics of love.
George Lakoff, AfterTv, 2007/01/16 November 4, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: lakoff language
add a comment
George Lakoff is respected as a social scientist. In this interview, he’s more outspoken on his view of the situation in the United States.
Are American values a monopoly of angry right-wing conservatives on talk-in radio? Not according to George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and founder of Berkeley’s progressive Rockridge Institute.
According to Lakoff’s provocative new book, Thinking Points: Communicating our American Values and Vision,the real political debate in America is all about language.
In Thinking Points, Lakoff turns the culture wars on their head and transforms American patriotism into a liberal virtue. Lakoff wants us to think about language and then act politically.
Steven Levy, “The Perfect Thing”, Get Illuminated, 2006/12/04 November 4, 2008
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: ipod, perfect thing, steven levy
add a comment
In addition to being a business success, the iPod can be studied as a cultural phenonenon.
In episode 4 of Boing Boing’s Get Illuminated podcast, Mark Frauenfelder spoke with Steven Levy, author of the excellent book, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness.
Steven talks about Steve Jobs’ role in the creation of the iPod, why the Zune is lousy, why Sony can’t make a good MP3 player, and what the rumored iPhone is going to be like.
