Archives

2007/12/18: And then there were three

Why have there been no posts on struct lately? Here's why:

My daughter Edith Clementine was born Nov 30! Mom and Dad are gladly surviving on little sleep to spend our love on this little one.

2007/11/02: The road to knowledge sharing is paved with good intentions

The article is about a model of motivational forces acting on an individual in relation to knowledge sharing, specifically in relation to the socialization and externalization parts of Nonaka and Konno's SECI model [1]. They gathered information via questionnaire, eventually collecting 154 responses from 27 companies in South Korea. They confirmed some unsurprising hypotheses, such as "people who think well of sharing knowledge profess a greater intention to do so" and "group cultures which value sharing knowledge influence people to profess a greater intention to do so also" [p. 100] They also found some things that surprised me, such as "individuals who feel that their self-worth is increased through knowledge sharing may not have a good attitute towards doing so" [p. 100].

I wonder how these different hypotheses interact -- the model proposed in the paper doesn't account for interactions between motivational factors. For instance, both organizational fairness and sense of self-worth are first order factors in the proposed research model [p. 92]. If an organization is not fair, this may also affect the sense of self worth factor as an individual may decline to share knowledge out of spite for the organization, even if they would feel better about themselves if they did. Similarly, the second order factors attitude towards knowledge sharing and subjective norm should be bi-directionally related: if individuals in a group have a poor attitude towards knowledge sharing, the subjective norm of the organization is likely to suffer.

1. Nonaka, I; Konno, N; "The Concept of "Ba": Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation", California Management Review, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1998) pp. 40-54.

2007/10/06: Design science vs "routine design"

Design science suffers more from diffuse boundaries with practice than I think behavioral science does, and this makes it hard for me to wrap my mind around what exactly differentiates design science from innovative design performed outside the research community. I am very interested in using design research to propel my own research, and so knowing what characteristics it has so that I can increase the probability of that whatever I do will be accepted, insofar as the form of the research is concerned.

Hevner et. al. say that the goal of design science is to provide utility; to solve a real problem, but not to show why the solution works (p. 80). They differentiate design science from "routine design" like so: routine design applies existing IS knowledge to solve current organizational problems (e.g. implementing yet another web server using best design principles is "routine design"), while design science "addresses important unsolved problems in unique or innovative ways or solved problems in more effective or efficient ways" (p. 81). Design science is frequently applied to problems for which the necessary IS knowledge may not yet exist. Its purpose is to address what have been called wicked problems (all of the below from p. 81):

• unstable requirements and constraints based on poorly defined or understood contexts

• complex interactions among subcomponents of the problem and its solution

• malleable processes and artifacts

• a critical dependence on creativity ( intuitive knowledge processes) to provide good solutions

• a critical dependence on social abilities (teamwork) to provide good solutions

I think that are a lot of innovative solutions being proposed and implemented outside the IS research community (Yahoo Pipes and various google products, for example), so I feel like the emphasis on innovation is not an effective distinguishing characteristic.

It is, I believe, the focus on the IS research community it is Hevner et. al.'s guidelines 4, 5 and 7 (research contributions, research rigor and communication of research, p. 83) that distinguishes design science most from innovative design. Those guidelines are really saying that if we innovate with the intention of furthering the goals of science, and contextualize it within the IS knowledge base and community by writing it up and communicating it back to the IS research community, then we are doing design science.

2007/09/29: Social software as formalized autism

Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student in Judith Donath's Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her argument is familiar: it's the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, oriented towards explaining why current design thinking on social software does not work. It seemed, at first, like an indictment of positivist design of social software (design as an embodiment of scientific principles), but on second read I took it to be a recapitulation of what I was taught as an engineer: understanding the problem is 90% of the solution, and designers don't understand the problem. Namely, how people actually interact, socially.

The author's claim is that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is typically designed in a way that models how autistic people or people with Asperger's Syndrome are taught to engage in social interactions: programmatically. "Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world" (p. 3). Current social software codifies social interaction in much the same way, but this does not fit anyone's actual needs. In fact, people will typically try to find ways around the built in social interaction rituals (p. 4-5), if they do not abandon the product altogether.

The paper suggests that designers should design social software around how people actually interact (using a user-driven iterative design methodology (p. 6)) instead of rigidly modeling poorly understood behaviors and offering the resultant product to people to use.

2007/09/22: Persuasion with Data Visualization

Summary of:

In this paper, Viegas and Wattenberg argue for the incorporation of perspective in creating information visualizations. Traditionally, analytical visualization tools have been designed to minimize distortion; to remove the point of view of the designer so that the visualization can offer an objective view of the data to the user and leave them to make their own conclusions. They suggest instead that designers should seek to incorporate particular perspectives on data sets if such a perspective makes the visualization more appropriate to a given task, and then extend that by saying that in some cases, we must acknowledge that the goal of a visualization is not only to analyze, but to persuade: "there are often valid reasons to want to change the way people think and it may be that much of the value of visualization comes from its ability to change attitudes" (p. 10). [ Read More ... ]

2007/09/19: CommentPress

CommentPress is a WordPress theme that allows readers to add comments to each paragraph of a document. Comments made on a paragraph appear in a column to the right of the body of the text, aligned with the paragraph, so that the reader can read and see the comments relatively in situ. The makers of CommentPress intend authors to post long works (articles or books) in sections to a CommentPress site, and then invite people to comment much as an editor would, paragraph by paragraph in the context of the text. Alternatively, the author can invite commenters to give very targeted comments, and then readers to read the text less like the post and response of blogging and somewhat more like a conversation, or a text with related and well-situated sidebars.

As a collaborative editing paradigm, I think it would be interesting to see how effective this is compared with the Wikipedia :Talk pages (see also [1]), in which comments are closely associated with the text being written, but are not visible while one is reading the text.

1. Viegas, FB; Wattenberg, M; Kriss, J; van Ham, F; "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia", System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, (2007) pp. 78-78.

2007/09/11: What is IS research?

Summary of:

This is a well written plea to the IS community which reminds me of Webster & Watson's in that its goal is to strengthen the field of IS by focusing the attention of researchers on the needs of the field. Where Webster & Watson ask researchers to look at other, more mature fields, and to see and acknowledge the importance of literature reviews in propelling and focusing research, Benbasat & Zmud ask a more fundamental question: just what is it that we're doing here, anyway?

Their models for "What is IS research?" seem heavily based on socio-technical systems theory: the interaction between humans and organizations and technology. The crucial point they make is that the primary purpose of IS is to study IT as an enabling agent; what we study are the relationships between the IT artifact, the organization (possibly society) and the individuals within it, and how each of them can be changed to improve the others. [ Read More ... ]

2007/09/05: moin-plugin-Delicious released

moin-plugin-Delicious provides a simple macro called DeliciousLinkroll which encapsulates the del.icio.us linkroll javascript snippet from http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls. An example of the plugin in action is the del.icio.us linkroll on the front page of this wiki.

See moin-plugin-Delicious for more information.

2007/09/03: moin-plugin-LinkedIn released

moin-plugin-LinkedIn provides the LinkedIn macro, which simply renders one of nine different LinkedIn buttons. For example, [[LinkedIn(cmalek,1)]] will render:

See moin-plugin-LinkedIn for more information.

2007/09/03: moin-plugin-CiteULike-0.0.3

I've released a new version of moin-plugin-CiteULike, which includes these changes:

• added the CiteULikeTitle macro, which takes the same arguments as CiteULike, but returns only the title. The title text will be a link to the appropriate entry on www.citeulike.org.

2007/09/03: Choosing Ph.D. Research Topics

Throughout my twenty-ish years in academics (as an undergraduate and master's student at UVa; as staff at Caltech; and as a Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University), I've learned much about choosing topics of study through talking with researchers, observing the choices graduate students have made and the outcomes that resulted, and through reading books like The Craft of Research. Now that I'm facing having to write papers and a dissertation of my own, I wanted to distill what I've learned into guidelines and write them down as reminders so that I don't lead myself astray over the coming years. [ Read More ... ]

2007/08/30: People: Edward Tufte

Information visualization is a core part of my research, and so I'm getting to know the big names in the field and their work. Edward Tufte's work has been a resource to me for several years. He is a primal force in information visualization, and his beautiful books are referenced commonly in papers which propose or use visualization tools or techniques. Prof. Tufte (he is professor emeritus at Yale University) has made a mission of educating people on how to honestly, clearly, and effectively present information. He is also famous his strong opinions on PowerPoint, starting with his analysis of a briefing slide uncovered during the space shuttle Columbia explosion investigation. Tufte's analysis shows how the poor information carrying capability of PowerPoint played a part in failing to prevent the disaster. [ Read More ... ]

2007/08/30: moinfacade-0.0.4

I've released a new version of moinfacade, which includes these changes:

• navigation.py: don't display items in primary menu entry that the user can't read

• tools.py: added IntermediateEditMenu

• facade.py: you can now specify the link text for the buttons used in the edit menus (called from LinkFactory)

2007/08/23: Talk before you type

Summary of:

This article is a follow up on the authors' own study of 2003 [1]. In that study, they introduced History Flow, a visualization which shows contributions of different authors on collaboratively written documents as time passes, and used it to analyze contributions to various Wikipedia articles: "the relevance of authorship, the value of community surveillance in ameliorating antisocial behavior, and how authors with competing prespectives negotiate their differences." [1, p. 575] In this article, they extend their work by analyzing data from Wikipedia from 2005 with two aim: to find out what has changed about collaboration patterns in Wikipedia since 2003, and to analyze how "Talk" pages are used to coordinate edits to Wikipedia articles. [ Read more ... ]

2007/08/14: Publish an RSS feed of Subversion commit messages

Teams that work together on the same files in a Subversion repository want a way to be notified when someone has committed updates. One way to do that is with an RSS feed; team members can all subscribe to the RSS feed and periodically check it.

Fortunately, Subversion allows you to define a command that will be run after a commit has completed. This is called the post-commit hook. We want to set our post-commit hook to be a script that maintains an RSS feed.

[ Read More ... ]

2007/07/19: Wikis and Academic Content Management

On Jul 17, 2007, I presented a talk to the Caltech Webmaster's Forum on academic websites -- websites for academic divisions, departments, research groups, individuals, projects, etc. -- and the role wikis can play in supporting them. [ Read More ... ]

2007/07/13: About Bill Curtis

I read this article recently:

(see the Summary)

Curtis has been tremendously influential in the software process improvement field, and this Curtis paper was his most highly cited: Google Scholar lists 763 papers which cite it. Of those papers which cite this one, more than fifty of them have been cited more than 50 times, themselves. Of his other papers, 11 that I can find have been cited more than 50 times and six more than 150 times (again according to Google Scholar). Those papers were all written between 1979 and 1995, in the golden years of software methodology resarch. [ Read More ... ]

2007/07/04: NASA and web services

Summary of:

I read this article because I wanted to find a example of someone who wanted to use web services for something that was (a) specific and real (b) compelling (to me), and (c) includes integration of legacy systems and data stores. Most of my reading about web services has been generic, hypothetical, or simply uninteresting (for example, "retrieve purchase orders", or "process inventory". Yawn.).

NASA is focused on developing a distributed service-oriented architecture to enable remote data processing of its huge data stores. This paper describes a NASA ACCESS project called “Deployable Suite of Data Mining Web Services for Online Science Data Repositories”, which is aimed at developing web service based technology to allow scientists to locally define analysis workflows that can directly use data residing in online repositories. Furthermore, it aims to allow scientists both within and outside of NASA to "combine persistent distributed data processing services and make them available to other users over the internet" (p. 1). [ Read More ... ]

2007/06/27: Web services in multi-agent systems

Summary of:

The author proposes building a distributed, evolutionary multi-agent system in which the middleware is web services. He then describes a system that he built which fulfills this. Each agent acts as a SOAP node in a peer to peer network, and can dynamically export its functionality via WSDL. Other inter-agent communication protocols may be used simultaneously. Using web services as middleware grants easy interoperability for agents of heterogeneous implementations and platforms, and allows agents to be incorporated into existing web service architectures. [ Read More ... ]

2007/06/20: Wherefore art thou, WSDL document?

Where does a WSDL document live, and how is it used? Is the WSDL record processed by a tool automatically, or do humans simply read the record and use it to guide code development? Do web services themselves access WSDL records -- is there machine to machine communication and automatic setup of interfaces going on with WSDL at the center? [ Read More ... ]

2007/06/14: SOAP vs REST (part 2)

One large part of the [debate in the web services community over SOAP vs REST has to do with business process choreography (more typically called workflow): coordination of long running business processes over many services and potentially more than one organization. A standard way of conducting choreography is critical because the complexity of coordinating API and data format specifications among many entities quickly becomes unruly. [ Read more ... ]

2007/06/06: SOAP vs REST

The web service architecture that Erl describes in Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology and Design is based on a combination of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. An alternative web service architecture called REST is currently in use by entities such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, del.icio.us, Flikr, CiteULike, Twitter. [ Read More ... ]

2007/06/04: Intuitive Knowledge Process

We generate intuitive knowledge via a particular part of our consciousness which I will call the intuitive knowledge process (what Gladwell calls the adaptive unconscious, perhaps). Intuitive knowledge is the output of this process; the inputs are observations, personal insights and previously generated intuitive knowledge. The intuitive knowledge process does not exist in isolation from the world: it directly influences the kinds of observations we make; social interaction affects the value of the the meaning created; and the process is constantly tuned with feedback from observations, insights, and social interaction with others. [ Read More ... ]

2007/05/30: Service-oriented Architecture: Where is it?

Service-Oriented Architecture by Thomas Erl introduces the idea of enterprise level applications built using web services. Web services are the basis of a strategy for doing distributed computing. The commercial sector showed great interest in web services from the start. But unlike Erl, who limits his book to applying web services to integration initiatives within the enterprise (where judging from the remainder of the book, complexity can still be found in great quantities), the "craze surrounding Web services revolv[ed] around this nirvana of inter-organizational distributed computing (supply chains being integrated across enterprises and across continents with applications built out of small parts that are supplied on demand by many distinct vendors)." By 2005, researchers were beginning to see that that world had not yet arrived, and was not likely to do so for years. "Cross-company implementations [...] are still comparatively rare." What happened? [ Read more ... ]