Daily Archives: March 10, 2010

Liberalism: what’s gone wrong? And what needs fixing?

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There an interesting symposium in Democracy in which a number of well-known US intellectuals wrestle with the question of whether — and how — liberalism needs to be redefined in the context of Obama’s (and Limbaugh’s) America. Panellists include Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Reich and Michael Walzer.

We asked some of America’s leading progressive thinkers to give us their takes on where the last 14 months fit within the historical scope of American liberalism. Here are their responses, which get at what may be the central challenge for progressives today. We have a liberalism that wants to do much–that has, over the years and decades, only added to its list of goals and desired interventions. But we have a system that seemingly in both political and policy terms simply can’t accommodate all those desires. We have what you might call an idea-oversupply problem. How, then, do we prioritize? What goals can succeed in the short term–and in the long term, can succeed in opening up more breathing room for the list?

Our symposium does not definitively answer these questions; they are, ultimately, unanswerable, destined for a state of constant flux, like Heraclitus’ ever-flowing river into which one cannot take the same step twice. But they’re the right questions, and our contributors address them in provocative ways.

“Software tells Bloggers what readers want”. Oh yeah?

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Hmmm… From Technology Review.

Blogging often sounds like a great idea: sharing thoughts and expertise, becoming a part of a community, and taking the first few steps to wider recognition as a writer. But many bloggers quickly get disillusioned.

IBM’s internal records show, for example, that only three percent of the company’s employees have posted to a blog at all. Of those who have, 80 percent have posted only five times or fewer. Many of the people interviewed for the study say they stopped blogging–or never got started–because they didn't think anyone would read their posts.

In an effort to fix this problem, IBM researchers have been experimenting with a tool called Blog Muse, which suggests a topic for a blog post with a ready-made audience.

“We saw this disconnect between readers and writers,” says Werner Geyer, a researcher at IBM’s center for social software in Cambridge who was involved with the work. The writers surveyed often weren't sure how to interest readers, and many of their posts got little to no response. Readers, on the other hand, couldn’t find blogs on the topics they wanted to read about.

So Geyer and his colleagues built a widget to bring these two halves of the problem closer together. Readers use the widget to suggest topics they want to read about, and they can vote in support of existing suggestions. Those suggestions then get sent to possible writers, matching topics to writers by analyzing his social network connections and areas of expertise.

And the result?

The effort didn’t substantially increase the quantity of posts however. The researchers speculate that this is because users who planned to write blog posts anyway simply chose suggested topics rather than coming up with their own.

Er, this post was suggested by nobody.

Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award

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Hooray! Business Week reports that:

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded the 2009 A.M. Turing Award to Charles P. Thacker, for his work in pioneering the networked personal computer.

In 1974, while at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Thacker built a prototype of a desktop computer, called the Alto. It featured a number of innovations that have since become commonplace on PCs, including a television-like screen, a graphical user interface and a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) text editor.

“The Alto was an amazing accomplishment,” said Charles Simonyi, who worked with Thacker at PARC and contributed software to the Alto. Simonyi later went on to head up Microsoft’s application software group. “The idea was to design something for the future, when the component prices came down. And that worked perfectly: The prices did come down and the design was correct.”

In an interview with IDG, Thacker recalled that the Alto development was led both by himself — he handled the hardware side — and Butler Lampson, who developed the software. The original prototype cost US$12,000. “This was a time in which $12,000 was a lot of money,” he said.

The researchers saw the appeal immediately. Simonyi said PARC employees and associates would sneak in at night to use the Alto to carry out mundane tasks like assembling Parent-Teacher Association newsletters or writing up a Ph.D thesis. “It was the first computer used by non-computer people for their own personal ends,” he said.

The innovation was not limited to the computer itself. "We had a system. We had the computers, the network, the laser printers and the servers all hooked up together," Thacker said. “That was the real benefit in my mind, that we were able to put together an entire system.”

The award also recognizes Thacker’s work in helping develop Ethernet, as well as his early prototypes of the multiprocessor workstation and the tablet personal computer. The secret to staying innovative? “You try to hire people who are smarter than you are,” he said.

It’s difficult to over-estimate the importance of what Thacker and his colleagues created.

This was a working system in 1973! It had everything that we take for granted today. And it was what prompted Steve Jobs to develop the Apple Macintosh.