First ARPAnet message
2009/10/29
This photo was sent to me by a good friend about a year ago:
ARPANET, 1969-10-29 22:30
You may now wish to read a bit more about the history of e-mail (book excerpt from “where wizards stay up late“).
PS: According to some people, today is the 40th Anniversary of the Internet. But as Christian Huitema said: “The more I hear this discussion, the more I compare it to finding the source of the river“.
The story of a lost manuscript
2009/10/28
In “The development of social network analysis” (for which I have blogged too) Linton C. Freeman, among other things, tracks the efforts of different scientists to lay a mathematical foundation for SNA. For two such efforts he writes:
“both Fararo (circa 1964) and I separately set out to specify the common mathmatical properties of all these seemingly different studies. Fararo circulated but never published his paper. Mine was presented several times and eventually published, but not until twenty-five years later.”
The unpublished manuscript in question was entitled “Theory of Webs and Social Systems Data“. I contacted Professor Fararo for the unpublished manuscript. He told me that he had lost his copy and that I might be lucky by asking Professor Freeman, which I did. When I contacted Professor Freeman he was away from home, but promised to look for it. Indeed about a week later he found the manuscript, had it scanned and emailed it to me. Like I told to my wife who is an archaeologist, I think this is what it feels when they (archaeologists) make a discovery.
Prior to writing this blog post, I told this story to two friends of mine. Funnily enough they asked me the same question:
- Name one Greek Professor who (a) would answer to your email and (b) would go into all that effort to locate something written circa 1965-1966 and send it to you.
This humble blog post stands to publicly thank both Professors for their kind replies and help.
Update: After getting permission, I uploaded the document on Scribd.
Lesson 14:
2009/10/26
During one of our artificial debates with my goto-guy, I restudied “What Goes Around Comes Around“, where while discussing the Object-Relational model we read:
Lesson 14: The major benefits of OR is two fold: putting code in the database (and thereby blurring the distinction between code and data) and user-defined access methods.
And Lisp does this since when?
re: The Humbling Power of P v NP
2009/10/22
In “The Humbling Power of P v NP“, Lance Fortnow urges theorists to try and solve P v NP “not because you will succeed but because you will fail” . This is the Kobayashi Maru character test for theorists it seems.
So what about non-theorists?
My answer is: So what if a problem is NP-complete? Does this mean that we are going to use that fact as an excuse to not solve it, or present a lousy hack as a solution? Or do people think that such problems do not come along the way of “a real professional”? They do, but theorists are trained to recognize them when they see them.
Just like theorists then, “practical computer people” must try to solve (using whatever tool they see fit) an NP-complete problem (like the TSP for example). Not because they will solve it optimally, but because there will always be a better solution. And by seeking it and understanding that “computation is a nasty beast” they will become better programmers professionals.
Update: You should also read “So what if it is undecidable or NP!“
The development of social network analysis
2009/10/21
As promised, I finished reading “The development of social network analysis“. The book, written by Linton C. Freeman follows the development of the field from pre-Moreno times and the introduction of structural thought into social studies up to the late 90s. According to the book cover it is based on the Keynote Lecture that Freeman gave in April 2000 at the twentieth annual meeting of the INSNA.
The study of social structure has come of age
This is the last sentence of the book. Before reaching it, Freeman takes us on a journey that roughly begins with the works of Auguste Comte who apparently planted the first seeds of structural thought. Since then the field of structural thought has been restarted a number of times, and for a variety of reasons, among them being megalomania, shift of interest, interdepartmental politics and job security, main scene politics (like the Jenner committee that essentially ended a whole group).
A whole chapter is devoted to the life of Jacob Levy Moreno, who many think of as the father of the field, although it is later shown that there were earlier studies with similar aims and results and that the systematic approach and development of his ideas is most probably owed to the work of Helen Jennings and Paul Lazarsfeld.
All the pioneers and heroes of SNA parade through the book, the flow of names and their interrelations is so vast that half way through the book I regretted not taking notes of the names and their relations in order to produce something like the TCS genealogy coupled with some visualization. Luckily, in page 131 such a pruned graph is presented by the author.
Professor Freeman characterizes social network analysis as an approach that involves four defining properties:
- It involves the intuition that links among social actors are important.
- It is based on the collection and analysis of data that record social relations that link actors.
- It draws heavily on graphic imagery to reveal and display the patterning of those links.
- It develops mathematical and computational models to describe and explain those patterns.
All the efforts of structural thought (almost all of them lacking combination of all four characteristics) are presented, most of them being in USA with a few in Europe, up until the great restart of the discipline by Harrison White and his team at Harvard. The central role that Barry Wellman played in unifying all the approaches to the structural thought, through organizing meetings with key persons, forming the INSNA and the Connections newsletter is covered. Plus the EIES system (of interest to those who seek fragments of Internet history) is also covered at some extent, showing the role that technology can play in forming both a discipline and (human) networks.
Asking Questions…
2009/10/20
We have seen that nobody should be afraid to ask a question. One of the first lessons I got from the USENET is that “Silly questions are the ones never asked”.
Today’s snail mail included the latest issue of NT Insider where Peter Viscarola in his column (Peter Pontificates) deals with the whole “asking a question” issue again:
Being a noob excuses stupidity. In fact, being a noob totaly means asking stupid questions. However, being a noob does not excuse lack of engineering discipline. As an engineer, I simply cannot understand how a fellow engineer can ask a question without at least attempting to put their question in its proper context.
How rightfully said.
cold drinks
2009/10/19
cold drinks, 2009/10/17
Object-oriented Programming with ANSI-C
2009/10/15
Seeing this post on Hacker News about the ooc programming language, I was reminded of a book I had found years ago circulating the net in PDF. It seems to be available from scribd now: Object-oriented Programming with ANSI-C.
Update: Also available from the author’s page: Axel-Tobias Schreiner.
