The Pebble and the Avalanche

SpeechTek 2008 Lectures, Workshops, and Sessions

Here' the current list of sessions I'll moderate, judge, instruct or lecture at for SpeechTek 2008 in New York City. If you'd like to attend SpeechTek, please register online.

Please note that I'll be running a "CCXML Application Workshop" at SpeechTEK again this year. The class will last for three hours, starting 1:15 P.M. on Thursday, August 21, 2008.

B101	Speaker	What End Users Really Want	Session description: Requirements for the Voice User Interface are often generated by people who don't understand the Voice User Interface. How do we generate meaningful and useful Voice User Interface requirements?	Mon., Aug. 18, 10:15 AM - 11:00 AM
A201	Moderator	Speech: Thinking Out of the Box	What are the bleeding-edge possibilities for speech technology?	Tues, Aug 19, 10:45 AM - 11:30 AM
SpeechTek Labs	Judge	Speech Application Tools	I will host, moderate, and judge a session on various speech application tools. If you'd like to participate in this session, please contact me.	Tuesday (exact time unknown)
STKU-9	Instructor	Stop Rude Calls: A CCXML Workshop for VoiceXML Veterans	Just in time for the elections, a service to block unwanted telephone calls. If you already understand VoiceXML and want to learn about CCXML, this workshop provides an introduction to the basic concepts of CCXML, including how to interact with VoiceXML applications.	Thurs., Aug. 21, 1:15 PM - 4:30 PM

Topics:  · announcements

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The Low Emission Car Problem

Honda will release an automobile that uses hydrogen as fuel; the car will be available in Japan and in a few parts of California starting in the autumn of 2008.

Automobiles are part of a system that includes roads, traffic signals, repair shops, spare parts manufacturers, and — above all — fuel supplies. The world has a fine network of gas stations, and it's easy enough to run an electrical cable to an outlet to re-charge an electric car; but introducing an entirely new type of fuel means building entirely new and expensive infrastructure.

The creation of this new infrastructure is a problem in disaggregation that has yet to be solved. I suspect that the solution will lie in some interesting new thinking about what it means to be an automobile manufacturer, what it means to be a service station, and what it means to be a public utility.

Topics:  · government · technology

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The Palm PDA: The Descent from Brilliance to Incompetence

I've just spent a few minutes working with my Palm PDA again. The Palm is simultaneously a great invention and a terribly frustrating piece of equipment. On the one hand, it really does store all my information and keep track of my schedule; on the other hand, the Palm software on my computer desktop can be intensely frustrating. Not to mention, of course, that the hardware always seems to give out after only a couple of years.

Take my address book, for example. A recent hardware fault with my Palm forced me to restore the system from scratch. Unfortunately in its latest incarnation the backup and restore software running on my desktop computer (a MacBook) decided to erase more or less all of my personalized categories. Instead of names and addresses sorted neatly into "Business," "Travel," "Restaurants," and the like, the addresses were dumped into one huge jumble that I'm still trying to sort out two months later.

What I find puzzling is how Palm descended from brilliance to incompetence. On the surface, Palm continues to make the right decisions; witness their recent decision to disaggregate themselves into a hardware company and a software company. But in practice Palm seems to be on a downward spiral: the iPhone is the choice for the hip and cool, Microsoft's horrid software ensnared most business users, and Google will shortly release Android to capture a wealth of innovation. There's a lesson in here somewhere and I intend to find out what it is.

Topics:  · business

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Twitter Feed

I now have my own Twitter feed.

Although I like Twitter, I also have the feeling that Twitter is just an intermediate step to an even more interesting and more useful method of communication. If I use Twitter every day, perhaps I'll be able to figure out what that next method will be.

Topics:  · announcements

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Plant Rights

The Swiss government wants to protect the "rights" and "dignity" of plants (PDF format); here's an interesting analysis. In my opinion, this is a failure of disaggregation: the Swiss government experts fail to distinguish between sentient and non-sentient living objects.

Topics:  · amusement · society

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Is "Prison Culture" Behind Chicago's Crime Wave?

According to an article by Gary Fields in the Wall Street Journal, former prison inmates bring their "prison culture" with them to the streets once they leave jail. This prison culture emphasizes "respect," which doesn't mean what I would think it means; and of course disputes are resolved by violence. The article then goes on to claim that because so many individuals in the US are incarcerated at some point in their lives, this prison culture is spreading across our cities and makes a noticeable contribution to violent crime. The City of Chicago experienced a small spike in murders recently, but with a sharp increase in deaths of school-age youth, and Mayor Daley is using this as an excuse to promote his anti-gun campaign.

While this article caught my eye — I began to wonder how disaggregation affects the connection between offender, victim, prison culture, and crimes — I would like to caution that I have to take the article with a huge grain of salt. The Wall Street Journal seems to have a cabal of reporters who promote Hillary Clinton with a stream of articles that read as if they come directly from her campaign headquarters. The most recent example was an extraordinarily poorly-written article on health care in the US, with a heavy emphasis on denigrating the management of non-profit hospitals.

This "prison culture" article carries a tell-tale quote from David Kennedy of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control: "This is part of the price we're paying for 20 years of mass incarceration." The notion that the prison population is too high is a common refrain in certain political circles.

While I've spent a while this morning trying to find some statistics on crime, the subtle political slant of this article is so unpersuasive that I think I'll put the entire question aside.

Topics:  · government · society

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Suing to Change a Diagnosis?

If this article is true (found via Techdirt), I believe I can promise the tactic will backfire. I find very unsettling the idea that a doctor can be sued to change his diagnosis to conform to a corporation's dogma. On the other hand, I have to commend Taser for fighting against unlawful-death lawsuits and sticking up for their product even if it does mean suing doctors in court; few enough companies seem to do this nowadays.

Society expects that a doctor's judgment be rendered without any outside pressure; just look at the furor over hypothetical conflicts of interest when doctors receive grant money from drug companies. If a company attempts to reverse the disaggregation of medical opinion from corporate interests, they will eventually face not just public opprobrium but in all likelihood Congressional attention.

One word of warning: add a grain of salt to the newspaper article. Reporters as a class seem to believe quite sincerely that doctors' integrity is under assault from corporations; I have to wonder if this corporation's side of the case is fairly represented.

Topics:  · business

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The Great Yahoo! Beer Money Caper

Microsoft's quest to purchase Yahoo! continues to puzzle me. First, there's Yahoo! itself as a company; I can't quite figure Yahoo's business model and why the company might be worth $45 billion — I can't help but thing of advertising revenue as just beer money. And Yahoo! itself evolved from a simple list of Internet resources into a huge aggregation of barely related resources. (I stopped reading Yahoo's new pages when Google News provided a more interesting new feed.)

The other question is about Microsoft itself. As others have pointed out, a hostile takeover rarely works in the Internet world. As far as I'm concerned, however, I can't imagine that Yahoo! would survive a Microsoft takeover even if it were friendly. Despite Microsoft's deep pockets and rigid control over the desktop, Microsoft's internal efforts to create a popular web site relevant to Microsoft's business model failed utterly. Microsoft clearly intends to modify Yahoo!'s operation to support Microsoft's goals (so I expect that Yahoo! will one day suddenly stop working with non-Microsoft browsers, for example).

This entire operation reminds me of AT&T's purchase of NCR. AT&T failed to create its own computer business; they purchased NCR instead, installed the managers who had failed at running AT&T's internal attempts, and promptly ran NCR into the ground. In the end, the mistake destroyed AT&T: AT&T's "trivestiture" allowed them to dispose of NCR while distracting investors by with the creation of Lucent.

Pointless aggregations are not a sign of strength. Disaggregation fosters innovation; random aggregations and forced integration generally fail miserably. Microsoft is about to make a company-killing mistake.

Topics:  · business · internet · microsoft

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Twitter as a Technical Resource

If you haven't used it, Twitter is one of those "I don't think I get it" technologies. Leaving aside the cute terminology, Twitter provides microblogging. Ordinary blogs are short essays, such as this one; when I write a blog post it usually takes considerable time and effort. Twitter accepts only very short blog entries, 140 characters or less. These updates are sent to anyone who subscribes to them and can also be tossed into a large public pool for anyone to read. While this might sound sort of useless and derivative, it's anything but; I ask you to recall that blogging is really just a quick-and-dirty way to update web pages, and look what it has become now. Twitter lowers the barrier even further.

Is Twitter popular? Yes, extremely so; new media technologist Dan York has a Twitter account followed by over one thousand people. His "tweets" cover everything from his his latest technology thoughts to the local weather. (My account is the much same way.)

I've recently discovered that Twitter can provide an amazing technical resource: instant expert help from people who you didn't know even existed. Some individuals monitor the entire Twitter stream for certain keywords — and they might respond to your comments with extremely welcome help. Earlier today I noted in passing that I couldn't find a particular software function in the Ruby programming language; a few moments later Ivor Paul responded with a few well-chosen links to Ruby documentation that will cut hours off of my learning curve. And earlier this week Neil Edwards, twittering from London, gave me a leg up on finding the right software to make Ruby on Rails more useful.

I'm fascinated by the capabilities of Twitter. Twitter is disaggregated: Twitter allows access to Twitter as a a building block for other services. Now I've begun to wonder just where all this will lead.

Topics:  · internet · technology

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No Cure Yet for Software Rot

Every year at about this time I do a bit of community service: I have my computer system make outbound phone calls to friends and relations who want a reminder of one of their religious obligations that's rather easy to overlook.

This year I have a very, very severe case of software rot. "Software rot" isn't a term in any dictionary; it's a phrase that I made up but that any technical person immediately understands. If you put a piece of software aside and don't look at it for six months, you often have trouble starting it up again. The software rots, a problem just as real as if though you'd put away your saddle away after riding without cleaning it properly. In my case, the outbound calls seem to work, but — ironically — the quality-assurance subsystem that I put into place verify that the calls are actually successful is itself failing.

I mean this post as a cautionary tale for managers. This particular application, as are many of the applications I work on, is built of many different subsystems. Some pieces are written in one programming language (Python) and others are written in more specialized languages (CCMXL and VoiceXML). The software relies on a wide variety of Internet protocols to work correctly (DNS and HTTP in particular). I rely on components from outside vendors and I've installed new hardware that uses some apparently very touchy new software.

Although it would be ridiculously expensive to build all this infrastructure from scratch intead of using these coponents, using the disaggregated components does impose some other costs. Any significant project I build uses change control to keep track of the software that I create, but — unlike a commercial service — I haven't instituted controls on this project to track software modules from elsewhere and the various bits of hardware. And since one of the items in the mix is a Windows-based PC, I suspect that I know where the problem really lies.

My point here is that disaggregation brings both incredible costs savings and a certain responsibility. I will get this service up and running correctly again (hopefully sometime today), but if this were a commercial service I'd be in trouble. Just because a service worked six months ago does not mean it will work today. No software exists in a vaccum. Software-based services require constant maintenance to avoid software rot.

Topics:  · technology

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