On The Margins

Friday June 25, 2004

[ Philosophy ] Electronic touch

Imagine what will happen if we sit in our rooms all our lives and keep in touch with the rest of the world electronically.

Hubert Dreyfus, attends to that imagined world, in the third part of his book On the Internet.

He notes that, in such an imagined world, "our bodies seem irrelevant and our minds seem to be present wherever our interest takes us."

Some have worried that if we stay in our rooms and only relate to the world and other people through the Net, we'll grow isolated and depressed. Some Stanford researchers have lamented that not enough attention is being paid to this problem. (J. Mark, "Portrait of a newer, lonlier crowd is captured in an Internet survey," The New York Times, Feb. 16, 2000)

So, have we gotten to a stage of ubiquity imagined in these surveys? What's wrong with disemobided presence? If there's a problem, how could our understanding evolve into doing business in a better way? Will thinking about these problems help us better focus our energies on a more productive and a better world scaffolding?

2004-06-25 18:14:37.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Java ] Group communications in Java

There's nothing more embarrassing and worse than missing a BoF you're supposed to be a speaker in. Nevertheless, because of some other commitments, I'm missing this year's JavaOne.

It would have been an honor to share the podium with Bela Ban, the lead for the JGroups project, and I would really encourage people to attend this wonderful BoF. Given presentations I've seen from Bela, it will be a truly educational experience.

What Bela has done for the Java community is quite significant. He and his cohorts have implemented a wonderfully simple group communications toolkit in Java.

His work is an outgrowth of earlier effort with Professor Ken Birman's research group at Cornell.

Isis, Horus and Ensemble are notable cousins of JGroups. For Ken, Spinglass is the most recent rendition of his research program.

JGroups is worth a download and play, and we have certainly done some studies with it. In fact, we designed and prototyped a failure detection system built on JGroups. There were some problems but nothing major that the JGroups community effort (and better knowledge of how to use group communications systems) should not be able to resolve.

2004-06-25 14:37:42.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Web ] Yet another virus . . .

Forbes is reporting that another virus may be on the loose.

The report says:

"The infection makes subtle changes to the Web site so visitors get a piece of code that's designed to retrieve from a Russian Web site software that records a person's keystrokes and can send data back, experts say. Such software 'Trojan horses' are routinely used to fish for credit card numbers, bank accounts, passwords and the like."

According to Microsoft's security program manager, the fixes are not yet complete. People are encouraged to raise the security settings of their IE to the highest level and to turn off the JavaScript feature of their browsers.

Mozilla and Opera are apparently immune to the virus . . .

Microsoft is maintaining a security bulletin on the virus, which it is calling Download.Ject ranking it as "severe" ! ! !

2004-06-25 13:43:11.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Philosophy ] Hyper-Learning or Hype

In the second essay in his book, On the Internet, Hubert Dreyfus focuses on the following question: How far is distance learning from education? Answering this specific question leads, by extension, to answering a more general question: Can we learn anything on the internet? The reason I draw that conclusion is that much of "distance learning" is going to be powered by the internet.

Dreyfus' answer to this question is: it all depends!

First, he notes that learning has many stages:

• The novice can understand tasks decomposed to their context-free features. The teacher says: Here's a tennis racket. Here's the handle. Here's the head. You hit the ball with the head, not the handle.
• The advanced beginner learns some of the more subtle features through examination of examples and exercises. The teacher says: Look at how this champion or that champion of the game plays it. Try this move or that other move.
• The competent goes beyond the beginner. The beginner is missing what is important in any given situation and finds it tedious and nerve racking to perform, wondering how any one could master the skills. A competent individual is more involved and discerns what is important in any given situation. The tennis player knows when to come to the net and when to keep his distance.
• The proficient has reached a stage where intuitive reactions have replaced reasoned (or calculative) responses. Situational responses become more important than the performer's theory of the skill. The tennis player comes to the net and keeps his distance without any concern for the theory of tennis.
• The expert not only sees what needs to be achieved but "thanks to his vast repertoire of situational discriminations, he also sees immediately how to achieve his goal." The expert can make more subtle and refined discriminations than the proficient.
• The next stage is practical wisdom which has to do with exercising ones skills within a cultural context. Practicing the art of team work and programming in China, India and U.S. have subtle differences. Only through practical wisdom can one operate within each culture.

So what's the upshot?

Well, Dreyfus says that even if telepresence works really well, it is still quite hard to have a committed master-student relationship and the involvement which is necessary for gaining expertise and practical wisdom. Hyper-learning becomes mere hype. Dreyfus says that at best competence can be gained through distance learning but even that depends on how much presence can be had through telepresence . . . It turns out, the answer is "not much."

2004-06-25 09:50:16.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.