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August 21, 2002
Digging Ideas Out of People's Heads
Dave McNamee is doing a good job on his weblog of narrating his work and keeping his co-workers updated about where his head is at on any given day. Good work Dave!
I worry sometimes about the public expression of information that should be kept confidential, but I worry more about the exponentially worse problem of keeping confidential that which should be publicly expressed. I can think of ways to solve the first problem, but I can't dig ideas out of people's heads. They must be expressed to be used.
05:13 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Web Services a Mirage?
In Migrating to Web Services, Roger Costello says:
How far along is the industry in achieving the Web services vision? Here's my take on it:
- The Web services vision is a mirage at the present. If you jump on it today you will loose.
- The only thing that's real today is XML. Use it.
I agree with this. My paper on Enabling Web Services is aimed squarely at how to use XML today so that an organization can use web services later. Roger is more conservative than I am with respect to some of the emerging standards. For example, he says: "Describe your Web services in an HTML document." where I'm very much in favor of using meta data such as XML Schemas, RDF, WSIL, and WRDL to take a stab at describing these services in a more structured way. Here's why: they're just not that hard and having the meta data structured gives you much more freedom to automatically process it later. The HTML will have to thrown away and can be automatically produced from the meta data in any event.
Roger also has a nice introductory paper on REST on his web site.
03:06 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Graduate Students and Tuition
Dave Fletcher comments on the Utah Legislatures fixation on out of state graduate students:
Marginal Cost of Goods. The Utah legislature's executive appropriations committee spent a lot of time yesterday talking about the cost associated with tuition waivers for graduate students at Utah's two research institutions (University of Utah and Utah State University). These graduate students, most of whom are teaching assistants or research assistants are granted in-state tuition. Legislators are concerned that the State is paying too much to support out-of-state students.
He continues with some good comments on the marginal cost of admitting new students. My take is slightly different: Here are a bunch of very bright people who are willing to come to our state and work for almost nothing in a university research program. Basic research and number of patents are one of the very best predictors of economic prosperity for a country (and probably a state as well). We ought to let them come here for free! The fact that we're able to take back almost all the trifling amount of money we pay them as research assistants in fees and tuition is amazing.
11:24 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Hacking Radio Stats
I was poking around in the Radio rankings and noticed something peculiar. If you look at this ranking, you'll notice that there are about 100 referers from a business opportunity site. However, when you go to that site, the weblog in the ranking isn't mentioned or linked anywhere. Turns out there's a bit of javascript in each page on the bizop site that loads the count GIF from radio.xmlstoragesystem.com.
I'm not sure I see the point. There are better ways to track webg site usage for non-Radio web sites, so that can't be it. And I'm not sure what good bolstering your ranking on the Radio Ranking does. The point is to have people read your weblog, not have a high ranking. The latter is meaningful only in as much as it is a reflection of the former.