Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

The Impending Demise of the University (Don Trapscott)

Thanks to my colleague Eamonn de Leastar for the link to this article: Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott

It's a bit polemic in style, but has some good academic references (not fully cited), and is really designed as a starting point for making people think, rather than as a full structured and justified contribution to the debate on Higher Education. We should remember that Universities are one of the most successful institutions the world has yet produced, with their core origins dating back to the Middle Ages, well before most modern states. We should also note that there are many types of Universities that exist in parallel: the traditional elitist universities that can often raise large funds outside of the state, the core state supported Universities that now tend to educate of the order of 50% of the total population in one form or another in western economies. And then there are other special vocational institutions (as we might term them in the UK) that educate some of the other 50% in addition to this. Thus, as Trow originally argued in 1974, and as he revisited this argument recently in 2005 (c.f. Trow 2005), higher education has gone through a process of massification, where it is almost established that everyone has as right to access to it. Thus there is more than one thing to be killed off, and it won't be easy :-)

Below are some extracts from my writing on this topic, draft for now, that may be of some relevance to this debate.

In the Anglo-American world (US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand) there seems to have been a need to re-evaluate the role of the university itself, almost a millennial urge around the turn of the century.

Derek Bok, as the President of Harvard, has had a particular interest in the the modern role of a university [Bok, 1982]. Bok’s more recent contribution to the debate on re-positioning the university has been to warn of increasing commercialisation in US universities [Bok, 2003].

In the UK and Ireland perhaps the most definitive account of what a university has been Newman’s The Idea of a University [Newman, 1854]. Two books published in the last ten years have explicitly re-addressed this vision for the first time in around a century and a half. In the first of these, Maskell and Robinson have been prompted by the shift in UK policy to defend what they view as the traditional Newman view of a liberal education [Maskell and Robinson, 2001], critiquing the uneducated nature of the policy discussion informing the transformations that are taking place in higher education. They question the language of investment in higher education and its explicit link to economic aims and objectives that they claim typifies current policy in the UK. In the second of these Gordon Graham takes a more nuanced approach [Graham, 2008], and argues in a more balanced way about the tensions between traditional liberal education views and modernising views of various forms.

In Australia Marginson and Considine trace the emerging enterprise culture in Australian universities during the 1990s [Marginson and Considine, 2000]. Their analysis pivots on the fact that underfunding of the sector is driving a pseudo-market in alternative income streams.

One particularly influential articulation of this process of change in universities is Slaughter and Leslie’s academic capitalism [Slaughter and Leslie, 1999]. The authors chart the fundamental change in the nature of the work being carried out by academics, and the way that HEIs are governed, in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada. They claim that the rate of change has not been seen in universities since the late nineteenth century, in response to the industrial revolution. In all these countries there is evidence that the traditional block grant for universities has been frozen or is declining, and that new funding is channeled through competitive processes usually linked to research and development, either coming directly from industry or from government with a policy of encouraging industrial linkages. Slaughter et al. link this rise of academic capitalism with the new managerialism in the management of the institutions.

In a comprehensive analysis of the research in the US through the 1980s and 1990s Geiger traces the complex story of the use of the marketplace to influence higher education funding and priorities [Geiger, 2004]. His analysis of four spheres of activity in contemporary American universities—finances, undergraduates, research and relations with industry—is at pains to highlight the extent to which simplistic economic models that hold true for commercial companies do not apply to the higher education sector. However, he acknowledges the extent to which the metaphor of the marketplace is central to the changes that have taken place in these spheres over the past two decades.

Another articulation is based on viewing this process within the context of globalization. Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff describe this a the creation of global knowledge economy, and the evolution of an complex ecosystem of interrelationships that they describe as a triple helix of university, industry and government linkages [Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997].

An influential view of this process is based on an analysis of the changing nature of the process of knowledge production itself. Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow argue that, in some cases, the nature of academic enquiry is changing so that traditional discipline based Mode-1 science is giving way to a new trans-disciplinary Mode-2 science, where groups of experts from different disciplines form a new temporary discipline for the duration of a collaboration [Gibbons et al., 1994]. If this thesis has some validity, it poses very fundamental threats to the nature of universities, structured and governed as they are on disciplinary-based faculties and departments.

References

• Bok, Derek [1982] Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.
• Bok, Derek [2003] Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
• Etzkowitz, Henry and Leydesdorff, Loet, editors [1997] A Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. UK London: Cassell Academic.
• Geiger, Roger L. [2004] Knowledge & Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace. Stanford, CA, USA: Stanford University Press.
• Gibbons, Michael; Limoges, Camille; Nowotny, Helga; Schwartzman, Simon; Scott, Peter; and Trow, Martin [1994] The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London, UK: Sage.
• Graham, Gordon [2008] Universities: The Recovery of an Idea. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2nd edition (revised) edition.
• Marginson, Simon and Considine, Mark [2000] The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Maskell, Duke and Robinson, Ian [2001] The New Idea of a University. London, UK: Haven Books.
• Newman, John Henry [1854] The Idea of a University. Yale University Press. (Republished 1996 ed. Turner, F.M.).
• Slaughter, Sheila and Leslie, Larry L. [1999] Academic Capitalism: Politics, Polices, and the Entrepeneurial University. Baltimore, MD, USA: John Hopkins University Press.
• Trow, Martin [1974] Policies for Higher Education, chapter Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education, pages 51–101. Paris, France: OECD. From the General Report on the Conference on Future Structures of Post-Secondary Education.
• Trow, Martin A. [2005] Paper WP2005-4, Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and Phases of Higher Education in Modern Societies since WWII. Institute of Governmental Studies.

EU backs proposal by ComReg to reduce Eircom access charges

Continuing on an Irish broadband theme, this article in Silicon republic has some interesting statistics, that Eircom provides, directly or indirectly, 96pc of the country's broadband (I assume this statistic excludes mobile broadband):

Silicon Republic article: EU backs ComReg proposal to cut Eircom access charges

As a result of the EU decision, Eircom will have to reduce the fee it charges other operators to access the ‘last mile’ of its infrastructure to provide broadband internet services to homes and businesses.

At present, 96pc of all DSL broadband sold in Ireland is sold either as an Eircom product or is re-sold by other operators.

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: “ComReg's proposal is good news for competition and consumers. Alternative operators will have to pay considerably less for access to Eircom's broadband network. They will thus be in a position to make more attractive retail offers and consumers will get a better choice.”

3 upgrade Irish mobile data infrastructure with NSN equipment

3 and Nokia Siemens Networks complete radio technology upgrade and demonstrate Ireland’s first roll out of I-HSPA

It is nice to see investment in faster mobile broadband being rolled out in Ireland. This is a direct result of the government's (DCENR rural broadband scheme) choice to contract out rural broadband to mobile, and this decision has already had some positive benefit. Hopefully the other mobile operators will follow suit. Hopefully as well it will not lead to the stagnation of fixed broadband, that currently can offer better performance when the infrastructure is there to support it.

Nokia Siemens Networks' I-HSPA (Internet High-Speed Packet Access) technology is currently being rolled out as part of the National Broadband Scheme, and will be extended to 3's existing network in Ireland. It is the first commercial deployment of I-HSPA in Ireland.

GlowCaps CONNECT: network enabled pill boxes!

This is a good example of how we are indeed moving towards an "Internet of Things" where everyday items become network enabled, and new services are built to explicit this new communications ability.

Vitality - GlowCaps Connect

The idea is that a patient who has to take regular medication can use these networked enabled pill box lids to help them track that they have taken their medication on schedule. The devices come with a warning lamp that can be plugged into any electrical socket in the house; this device communicates back to the pill box and glows a warning colour when it is time to take medications. The system can also dispatch weekly emails to a supportive family member. It seems that it being marketed as an integrated service where the end user rings a phone number to setup his required schedule. The information is also passed on to the doctor, so the patient is more accountable.

• Personal Reminders GlowCaps flash and play a melody so you don’t forget. They can even call your home phone to remind you (optional).


• Social Network Support: Send a weekly update to a friend, family member or caregiver (optional).


• Refill Coordination: GlowCaps count your pills and remind you to order refills from your pharmacy before you run out.


• Doctor Accountability: Each month, GlowCaps mail you and your doctor a report with incentives if you exceed your adherence goal

The Great GoogleLapse

The Great GoogleLapse: Security to the Core | Arbor Networks Security This post has an excellent graph of the recent network outage caused by a routing error for some users of Google services. One explanation I read has linked this to an IPv6 upgrade in Google. This is an interesting event for a number of reasons:

• It reminds us that even the best managed Internet services can have problems, and that there is a serious risk in trusting your IT requirements to external services on the network. This is wake up call for those overly enthusiastic about cloud computing in particular and software services in general.
• Despite this, the outage was relative short, less than two hours, which is a lot better than the speed with which my own organisation could expect to solve a technical problem. But then we don't have the same requirements as many large enterprises would.
• It is interesting that IPv6 was one of the culprits. It is often blamed for network problems at present, partly because peope don't know enough to rule it out, and partly because it does sometimes lead to some strange problems (c.f. Geoff Huston's blog post of web client issues linked to IPv6 for an example of some real issues with IPv6).

IPv6 and the Internet of Things

Whilst representing Ireland at the EU IPv6 Event in Brussels (Belgium) today I head about this new body that could be influential in standardising the use of IPv6 for sensor networks going forward.

IPSO Alliance: Promoting the use of IP for Smart Objects

The domain of Smart Objects is vast. As sensors for light, pressure, temperature, vibration, actuators, and other similar objects evolve, new applications and solutions are being created and implemented. Indeed, "smart cities", "smart grid", home and building automation, industrial applications, asset tracking, utility metering, etc are all taking of IPv6's rich history and adaptability.

Companies and consumers are ready for the level of automation that Smart Objects can bring. In order to satisfy the growing demand of information and standardization in the domain of the Internet of Things, more than 27 companies (IPSO Initial founders) have decided to join their efforts.

The IPSO Alliance will perform interoperability tests, document the use of new IP-based technologies, conduct marketing activities and serve as an information repository for users seeking to understand the role of IP in networks of physical objects. Its role will complement the work of entities such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) or the ISA which develop and ratify technical standards in the Internet community.

The IPSO Alliance is an open, informal and thought-leading association of like-minded organizations and individuals that promote the value of using the Internet Protocol for the networking of Smart Objects.

QZHTTP

February 2009 Web Server Survey - Netcraft

It is interesting to note the massive impact, on statistics about on-line websites held by Netcraft.com, that one large Chinese hosting site, the Qzone blogging service, has had.

In the February 2009 survey we received responses from 215,675,903 sites. This reflects a phenomenal monthly gain of more than 30 million sites, bringing the total up by more than 16%.

This majority of this month's growth is down to the appearance of 20 million Chinese sites served by QZHTTP. This web server is used by QQ to serve millions of Qzone sites beneath the qq.com domain.

QQ is already well known for providing the most widely used instant messenger client in China, but this month's inclusion of the Qzone blogging service instantly makes the company the largest blog site provider in the survey, surpassing the likes of Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and MySpace.

The web server they use, their own customized software called QZHTTP, is now the 3rd most popular web server in the world, after Apache and MS IIS, with just shy of a 10% share of the server market; that's real impact! I guess this is just the beginning of this type of phenomenon as the Chinese start to impact on many such on-line statistics.

SFI Strategic Research Cluster award for FAME project

Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan T.D, has on Wednesday, February 25th 2009, announced the establishment of 5 new Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Strategic Research Clusters (SRCs) representing a €23.9 million investment in ground-breaking, collaborative research activities involving seven academic institutions and 22 companies. One of these is led by the TSSG in Waterford Institute of Technology: FAME (Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end Communication Services), with funding of €5.9 Million over 5 years 2009-2013.

About FAME Lead PI (Name and Title): William Donnelly, Dr.
Lead Institution: Waterford Institute of Technology
Co-PIs (Names, Titles, Institution):

• Declan O’Sullivan, Dr., TCD
• Liam Murphy, Prof., UCD
• Douglas Leith, Prof., NUIM
• John Strassner, WIT

Academic Partner Institutions:

• Trinity College Dublin, TCD
• University College Dublin, UCD
• National University Ireland Maynooth, NUIM
• University College Cork, UCC

Industry Partners:

• Alcatel-Lucent, Dublin
• Cisco Systems, Galway
• LM Ericsson Limited, Dublin
• IBM Ireland Product Limited, Dublin
• Telefónica I+D, Madrid, Spain
• Hewlett Packard, New Jersey, USA

A key challenge for the telecommunications industry is to deliver and manage end-to-end communications services over an interconnected, but heterogeneous, networking infrastructure. The SFI-funded Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end communication services (FAME) Strategic Research Cluster (SRC) will develop autonomic management solutions incorporating new semantic analysis techniques, that can be applied to build federated network and service management systems that understand changes in the environment and coordinate their actions to reconfigure network resources and services to effectively deliver services on an end-to-end basis. FAME brings together academics and industry specialists in the management of communications networks and services. This project is pushing the barriers of what is technically possible in terms of allowing forms of self-management, allowing some parts of a network, and some services that run on these networks, to “work out for themselves” what is needed to operate efficiently. Intellectual Property and technical know-how generated by FAME will enable the creation and growth of an Irish-based international communications service management cluster that will grow the considerable investment already made in this sector by multinational companies, such as the cluster partners Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, HP, IBM, and Telefónica I+D, as well as indigenous communications management companies. Together this cluster will help position Ireland as a global leader in communications management related research, product development and professional services.

In the photograph:

Front Row:

Brian O'Donnovan (IBM), Declan O'Sullivan (TCD), Willie Donnelly (WIT), Frank Gannon (Director, SFI), Mary Coughlan (Tánaiste, Minister DETE), Dave Lewis (TCD), Jimmy Devins (Minister STI), Seán Murphy (UCD), Mícheál Ó Foghlú (WIT), Philip Perry (UCD), Liam Murphy (UCD).

Back Row:

David Malone (NUIM), John Keeney (TCD), Simon Foley (UCC), Brendan Jennings (WIT), Aidan Boran (Alcatel-Lucent/Bell-Labs), Sven van der Meer (WIT), Martin Serrano (WIT), Rob Brennan (TCD), Doug Leith (NUIM), Owen Conlon (TCD), Sasi Balasubramaniam (WIT), Dmitri Botvich (WIT), Liam Fallon (Ericsson).

Press Coverage of Irish IPv6 Summit

The picture shows Mícheál Ó Foghlú (Executive Director Research, TSSG) and the Eamonn Ryan (Minister of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources) at the opening of the Irish IPv6 Summit on Wednesday 28th January 2009. Over 150 delegates from industry and the public sector attended. Many had a technical networking background, and others had a decision making and/or policy role within their organisations.

The main message of the event was that the current Internet infrastructure relies for growth on the availability of IPv4 addresses, and that all predictions now converge on exhaustion of the address space within the next 3 to 5 years. This is a very short time in terms of planning migration to a new network infrastructure. The only potential candidate to replace IPv4 is IPv6. Though there are many interesting research approaches that may lead to interesting alternatives, none can produce an agreed standard for deployment in the short time required.

The TSSG were very happy to organise the event, with the Irish IPv6 Task Force, on Wednesday 28th January 2009. The event was streamed live over IPv4 and IPv6, and video clips of all talks, and PDF versions of all slides will be made available on the main event website.

WIT published a Press Release.

The event was covered in the Irish Times the following day in the Finance section, see the TSSG Press Page.

RTE Radio recorded a special on-line feature on the event that can be streamed from RTE Special Feature.

The event was supported by the TSSG (Waterford IT), HEAnet (Ireland's National Research Network) and DCENR (Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources).

The event was sponsored by The Internet Society (ISOC), Ireland's Domain Registry (IEDR) and Hutchison 3G Ireland (Three).

Live Irish IPv6 Summit Video Stream

A live Irish video stream will be available here: HEAnet stream tomorrow Wednesday 28th Jan 2009.

ceatra.ie on Internet Tropes

Well this was an interesting read:

"First, Goodwin’s law. In its original form, it stated that as a usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. One evolution is that it is now applied not to usenet discussions (of blessed memory) but, first, to all internet discussions, and then to debate in general. And another evolution is the qualification that, once the comparison occurs, the debate is automatically ended and whoever made the comparison has automatically lost."

cearta.ie -> Three internet tropes

Irish IPv6 Summit (Wed 28th Jan 2009)

Well, my blog has be quiet for over a month now as I have focused my energies on a number of things. Foremost amongst these is the IPv6 Summit that will take place all day tomorrow in Dublin Castle. We're very happy with the panel of speakers, including the opening by Minister of Communications, Eamon Ryan, and the two keynote speakers, Fred Baker (Cisco), who has a very prominent role in IETF standardisation, and Detlef Eckert (EU Commission), who is a senior policy advisor to DG-Information Society and Media, the unit in the EU Commission with responsibility for ICT policy.

The other speakers are myself, opening the event in my role as Chair of the Irish IPv6 TF, John Boland (CEO of HEAnet), Ireland's national research network, Niall Murphy (Google), Dave Northey (Microsoft), Giorgio Lembo (Tiscali International Networks), John King (BT), Zoltan Gelencser (Hutchison3G UK), Ross Chandler (Eircom), David Malone (NUI Maynooth), and Nick Hilliard (Dublin Internet Neutral Exchange).

Irish IPv6 Summit (Home Page)
Irish IPv6 Summit Agenda (PDF)
Irish IPv6 Summit Agenda (HTML)

This is an impressive line up of technical and political awareness of the importance of understanding the next generation Internet protocol. The Internet is a huge success story that underpins much of the world’s ICT infrastructure today BUT “Peak IPv4” is nearly upon us. This will see the last central block of IPv4 addresses allocated to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) at the end of 2010. The impact on users will be that they will not be able to get new public IPv4 addresses 12-18 months after that.

This is not a complete doomsday scenario, the existing Internet will continue to work after the addresses run out. The problem is that the whole philosophy of the Internet is based on growth into new areas: bring more and more of the world's population on-line, bring more diverse devices on-line from mobile phones to built-in sensors in buildings. For this trajectory to continue, new addresses are needed. So it really makes sense for anyone upgrading a network today to invest in a solution that is at least IPv6 compatible, so that they have the option of migrating to IPv6 within the next 5 years when these shortage issues start to bite. As more and more people do switch over, it should make the argument easier --- this is a network effect problem where you need to get a critical mass of acceptance to create the right environment for it to become the obvious choice.

Restoring an address abundance has many potential advantages. It re-enables the pure end-to-end model of the Internet where every device has a public address, and so, with due consideration of the security issues, could offer a service to any other device. In other words it re-enables the peer-to-peer potential of the Internet and low barrier to entry for new services.

So if you are interested in the debate, register and come along tomorrow. If you cannot come we'll be streaming the event live over IPv4 and IPv6 (thanks to HEAnet), and we'll be making on-line videos of the talks, as well as the slides, available on-line after the event.

Irish IPv6 Summit 2009 - On-Line Registration Now Open

Irish IPv6 Summit 2009 (Wed 28th January 2009, Dublin Castle) - the on-line registration has been opened, and the draft programme has been published.

Nubiq Wins Best of Mobile Internet World 2008 Innovation Award

Nubiq has won a Mobile Internet World 2008 Innovation Award: Most Innovative Consumer Mobile Internet Deployment. This was announced at the Mobile Internet 2008 conference in Boston last week. Congratulations to Hélene and all the team!

More info - xchange magazine

Advent 4211 Netbook

There is key change happening in the world of end user devices for the Internet. Here I am not talking about the move to smart phones, and the possibility that much Internet access in the future will be from such mobile devices rather than from desktop and laptop PCs - though that is indeed an important trend. No, I am talking about the rise of a new type of devices that bridges the gap between a mobile phone and a laptop - a mini-laptop, or sub-laptop, called a netbook.

This movement may have been started by Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), but its effects are now seen in the lauch in 2007 of the Eee PC, a netbook with limited hardware, but a fully functional laptop with a keyboard, screen and trackpad/buttons nevertheless.

The second iteration of netbooks, with many other providers jumping on this bandwagon, were launched in the summer of 2008. I purchased one of these, an Advent 4211, effectively a re-badged MSI Wind, for €365 (including 2 years warranty) from pixmania.ie, including VAT and delivery. This came with Windows XP Home, a 1024x600 screen (but VGA out to drive larger screens if needed), an Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB RAM, 80GB hard disk. Note that other MSI Wind models have solid state storage rather than hard disks, but I went for the Advent that only came with a traditional hard disk. Note that many netbooks use Linux Operating System rather than Windows, Advent only comes with Windows, but I've since installed kubuntu as a dual-boot alternative.

The good things about the netbook are:

• It is very light (1.3kg) and small enough to balance on one knee;
• It is a fully featured Operating System (Windows or Linux) so can run any application that those OSs support;
• It has a fully functional keyboard;
• You can open it fully on an economy aircraft table;
• It is so cheap you could consider buying one for many purposes, for example unobtrusive seating room use;
• The SDHC slot can take up to 16GB cards that help to make up for the lack of optical drives (CD/DVD).

The main negatives are:

• No optical drive (CD/DVD)l
• Cheap tracker pad and buttons take some getting used to;
• Limited screen size, especially the 600 pixel height, does inhibit some types of applications;
• Battery life is poor at just over 2h on a full charge - there may be a newer better battery which would be a good upgrade if doing a lot of mobile working.

My conclusion was that it was perfect for me as a lightweight travel laptop. Also it provided me an ideal opportunity to experiment with the use of Linux as a primary laptop/desktop.

I installed kubuntu (Hard Heron) from an external USB DVD, on the machine and came across a number of issues. One was an issue that had bothered me on some ubuntu desktops before. I use IMAP email, and typically I use either Apples Mail.app or Mozilla Thunderbird. Over the years I have optimised my email folder structure using underscores to put important folders earlier in the sort order. the default settings in ubuntu and kubuntu (when I had set my location as Ireland) was for a strange sort order where the underscore files sorted as if there were no underscores. I had investigated this briefly before, and concluded that this was an underlying OS issue, rather than a application issue. The spotlight fell on the "locale" settings. After discussing this with Rotan Hanrahan, who happened to have Open SuSE installed on his laptop, we managed to figure out that what I needed was to set the locale variable "LC_COLLATE" to a value of "POSIX" rather than "en_IE.UTF-8". In kubuntu this can be changed using:

$ sudo update-locale LC_COLLATE=POSIX

and restarting the X-Windows session. This worked a treat leaving my locale settings as:

LANG=en_IE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_IE:en
LC_CTYPE="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=POSIX
LC_MONETARY="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_IE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_IE.UTF-8"

So that I could access my Euro symbol, and the accented characters I needed for Irish (e.g. my own name), but the sort order I was expecting was restored.

So now all I need to figure out is how to get the sort order fixed on applications like Thunderbird in OS X :-)

W3C TPAC 2008, Nice

I am at the Advisory Committee meeting of the W3C in Mandelieu, near Nice in France. As usual it is a great buzz with loads of people trying to progress web standards and related standards. The rules of the meeting are such that I cannot blog directly about the contents of the meeting itself - fair enough!

However, the AC (Advisory Committee) meeting is co-located with a TP (Technical Plenary) meeting, many aspects of the latter are more public. Starting at the public W3C TPAC 2008 web page, or the news posting on the W3C front page, will lead to the stuff that is public. Some staff members are also blogging here.

eChallenges Snapshots

Mícheál Ó Foghlú, TSSG, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland

Michael Decker, University of Karlsrue, Germany

One-Page Self-Editing Wikis: TiddlyWiki

I have just discovered JeremyRuston's Open Source TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook. Very interesting. The Wiki is imolemented in Javascript within the HTML file itself - and it updates itself with new content.

I am still more of a blog guy than a WiKi guy at heart, but the ease of this (for those who understand Wikis) is interesting.

Scenario: lecturer uses one TiddlyWiki on her/his laptop to edit the slides for a lecture. When ready, they are published to a place where the student can access. Then these could be allowed to be edited by the class and resubmitted to the class - perhaps with each student having one section to expand or give a critique on via a number of new slides (WiKi entries).

Scenario: anyone who is comfortable with it use TiddlyWiki as a personal note taking tool, that captures information in hypertext as linked web pages but authored as a Wiki and saveable as a single file - easy to archive or distribute.

Thanks to Stephan Raimer, TPC member of eChallenges, for alerting me to these possibilities.

By the way, the story of the TiddlyWiki author is very interesting. BT acquired his open source company in May 2007, established osmosoft, and has been using this as what seems to be a kind of open source skunk works team.... one to watch.

eChallenges 2008

I am here in Stockholm for the first day of the eChallenges 2008 conference tomorrow, Wednesday 22nd October 2008.

I have been involved in this conference series since Venice in 2001 when I presented a paper on the work of SEISS in the south east of Ireland, creating a forum for public and private sector interests to come together under an Information Society banner. The SEISS work led to a successful bid for regional broadband investment, the SERPENT project, that saw fibre installed in the regional towns and cities.

Since then I became involved in the Technical Programme Committee and I have watched as this conference has matured and grown, where it now regularly has over 600 delegates. The core driver for the conference is the EU research programme, but the conference is much more than that.

I like the eclectic mix that this involves. You get public sector folks, working on eGovernment projects, who have one spin on things. You get lots of European industrial/commercial folks with another spin. And you also get academics who are always spinning. There are enough important decision makers from all of these areas, to make it worth coming; and enough technical people as well so that some of what is said is grounded in what is actually possible. So all in all a very enjoyable event.

Thanks to Miriam and Paul Cunningham, who've steered the conference since 2003, for keeping such a healthy balance going throughout this period.

TSSG Future Internet Event: Dublin Digital Hub Wed 29th Oct 2008

The TSSG will host The Irish Future Internet Forum in the Dublin Digital Exchange (part of the Digital Hub) on Wednesday 29th Oct 2008 at 13:30-19:00.

HEA PRTLI Cycle 4: FutureComm

On Monday and Tuesday this week we had our third meeting of partners of the HEA PRTLI Cycle 4 research programme FutureComm. The event was hosted by NUI Maynooth (both the Hamilton Institute, and the Dept. Sociology here are partners). The other partners are ourselves (TSSG in Waterford IT) and the Interaction Design Centre (University of Limerick).

We're just starting to get to the stage where we may expose some of our internal discussions to the public, hence we've launched a simple public blog: HEA-FutureComm.

The programme is quite innovative as it attempts to bridge the technical community working on the future of network and service management, from both Internet and Telecommunications perspectives, with a wider contextual social analysis of the issues around governance of networks and services, and an analysis of social networking and how it links to potential network and service dynamic reconfiguration.

PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl Today: The State of the Scripting Universe

Lynn Greiner discusses the use of scripting languages in mainstream applications development PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl Today: The State of the Scripting Universe - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership. She refers back to an article she wrote in March 2005 on the same topic, and notes the much deeper penetration of scripting as a valid development tool today in 2008.

In the TSSG we have been firmly behind scripting languages as a vital part of any developers toolbox for many years. You may know that I published some books on Perl back in 1996 (e.g. Perl 5 Quick Reference (QUE)), and our team of developers and researchers have expertise in all of these languages, particularly JavaScript (ECMAScript), Ruby, Perl, Python and PHP. In particular one of our spin-out companies, FeedHenry, is based on creating a publicly hosted widget framework that promotes ease of creating of new services using lightweight scripting approaches.

Perhaps the best cited article on the advantages of scripting is John K. Ousterhout's "Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century", published in IEEE Computer in March 1998. John, the author of the popular scripting language Tcl (pronounced "tickle"), pretty much lays out the case for scripting languages. The major developments since then have been the creation of new scripting languages with special usefulness for certain domains, and a maturity in the tools that help developers use scripting languages, and test and debug their scripts/programs.

A recent Forrester report "The Forrester Wave: Dynamic Programming Languages, Q3 2007" underlines the case for dynamic languages, focusing on Python, PHP and Perl.

The popular acronym for open source development platform LAMP comprises four elements:

• (L)inux (perhaps more properly termed GNU Linux made up of both the Linux operating system and the, many GNU, open source tools such as gcc that enable it);
• (A)pache open source web servers, note that Apache has been the leading web server in the world since 1996;
• (M)ySQL/PostgreSQL open source relational databases;
• (P)erl/PHP/Python/Ruby/... open source scripting languages;

The O'Reilly ONLamp.com site has a great range of materials on the various elements of this platform, and O'Reilly publish the leading books on each topic (e.g. Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant's book Programming Perl (3rd Edition July 2000), known as the Camel Book because of its cover).

Interactive NSF History of the Internet

This has some interesting videos and some well structured content: nsf.gov - NSF and the Birth of the Internet - Special Report

Google Estimate Over 1 Trillion Web Pages

Thanks to CircleID: Google Says Its Counting Over 1 Trillion Unique Pages on the Web?

"We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days—when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!"

It has been noted however that Google does not index all 1 Trillion web pages (see Michael Arrington)

Internet Adoption Myths?

In this excellent article Hannemyr: The Internet as Hyperbole Gisle Hannemyr argues that the often stated fact that Internet adoption was faster then other technology adoptions (such as radio, TV or telephone) is overstated. Thanks to Miguel.

It is widely believed that the adoption rate of the Interｭnet has exceeded that of earlier mass communication technologies by several magnitudes. This paper reviews the historic data related to some of these technologies, draws on actor-network theory as a framework for interpreting such data, traces the transformations and translation of this data in the public, political, and scientific discourse, and discusses the use of <> in modern society.

Metaphors and Networks

Saving the Net III: Understanding its Frames | Linux Journal

Doc Searls makes an interesting argument about how the metaphors we use for the Internet/Web influence how we think about it. It contains an excellent set of references (e.g. Zittrain, Reed), so I'll be using this as starting point for my students as an aid to understanding the debates around the future of the Internet.

Camino-Waterford (May 2008)

Over the past two weeks I have travelled on the Camino Santiago (the way of St James) from Waterford to Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, Spain. The route involved sailing on board the Jeanie Johnston (a replica 19th century wooden hulled sailing ship --- as close to medieval as we could get) from Waterford quay, out of the Waterford estuary, and the southwards past the Scilly Isles and across the Bay of Biscay to A Coruña on the north coast of Galicia; this was a journey of 4 days. The next section was on foot from A Coruña to Santiago de Compostela over 3 days. Finally we spent a few days in Santiago before flying back a more conventional twenty first century route to Dublin airport.

The journey was a recreation of the pilgrimage taken by a previous Mayor of Waterford City in 1473 and 1483, James Rice. This route was known in Medieval times as the "English Way", which was an alternative to the more famous land routes to Santiago such as the French routes that cross the Pyrenees and converge near Pamplona, or the internal Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) routes coming from the south.

I have posted three sets of public photographs (as yet undocumented) on the Flickr photo sharing site, and I've made this available to everyone so that the people I travelled with can have easy access to them:

• Camino-Waterford Preamble (a small number of photographs taken on my camera phone during and after the ceremony in Christ Church Cathedral where Mary O'Halloran, the Mayor of Waterford, sent us on our way)
• Camino-Waterford Voyage (photographs taken with my Cannon 400D SLR with a Sigma 30mm F1.4 EX DC prime lens)
• Camino-Waterford Walk (photographs taken with my Cannon 400D SLR with a Sigma 30mm F1.4 EX DC prime lens)

I found the camino to a be a fantastic experience, particularly because of the people who we travelled with on the ship, and on foot. So a big thanks to my fellow pilgrims: Eamonn, John (of the shell), Jackie, Nina, Mary, Anne, Paddy, Pat, Jim, Oliver, Brian, Aidan and Tim; a big thanks to our fellow travellers on the ship: Sean, John, Pat, Maeve, Coleman, Stephen and Steve; a big thanks to the captain, officers and crew of the Jeanie Johnston (the captain, Luca, Paul, Daithi, , Quentin, Jim, Charlie, Suzie, Earl, Karen, Pat and Johnnie). The trip was organised by the Waterford Museum of Treasures, who placed this article (worth reading for some historical background on James Rice who made the pilgrimage in 1473 and 1483) in the local newspaper the Munster Express; so a special thanks to Eamonn and Donnchadh for making it all possible.

References

• Edwin Mullins, 1974, The Pilgrimage to Santiago (the best book I have found about the pilgrimage which, though it focuses on the route from Paris over land, covers much of the history and context for the growth and decline in popularity of the pilgrimage).
• Camino de Santiago A practical blog about doing the walking pilgrimage today.

TSSG spin-out Zolk C wins prestigious museums award

In London on Wednesday 7th May 2008 the National Trust for Scotland was presented with an a Museums & Heritage Award (full list of awards) for "Use of Technology" in its Culloden site. This recognised the innovative use of technology, a GPS PDA system that delivers an integrated multimedia audio, video and text guide to visitors to the Culloden Battlefield site near Inverness in Scotland. This solution was developed by the TSSG spin-out joint venture company Zolk C together with content management experts.

Edited Wikipedia entry on Battle of Culloden

The Battle of Culloden (Scotts Gaelic: Blàr Chùil Lodair--most of the Highlanders would have spoken Scotts Gaelic), 16 April 1746, was the final clash between the Jacobites and the British Government in the 1745 Jacobite Rising. Culloden brought the Jacobite cause--to restore the House of Stuart to the throne of the Kingdom of Great Britain--to a decisive defeat.

The Jacobites--the majority of them Highland Scots, although containing significant numbers of Lowland forces--supported the claim of James Francis Edward Stuart (aka "The Old Pretender") to the throne; the government army, under the Duke of Cumberland, younger son of the Hanoverian sovereign, King George II, supported his father's cause. It too included significant numbers of Highland Scots, as well as Scottish Lowlanders and some English troops.

The aftermath of the battle was brutal and earned the victorious general the name "Butcher" Cumberland. Charles Edward Stuart eventually left Britain and went to Rome, never to attempt to take the throne again. Civil penalties were also severe. New laws attacked the Highlanders' clan system, and Highland dress was outlawed.

The picture shows myself, Paul Savage and Eamonn de Leastar, the TSSG members who were present at the award ceremony. No blood was spilled, though kilts were in evidence. A big thank you to the full team who made the award possible, including all those in the TSSG who helped.

• Zolk C (at present home page has pictures of the full Zolk C team, including myself)
• TSSG
• Culloden Battlefield
• Museums & Heritage Show

FeedHenry partner with Oracle

SiliconRepublic.com: Irish firm at spearhead of Oracle’s Web 2.0 plans

The TSSG spin-out company FeedHenry has partnered with Oracle. They're starting to gain some traction in the market, and we see a bright future for the dynamic mix of service development platform with legacy interfaces and lightweight widget-based scripting allowing easy creation of Web 2.0 mash-ups. This is particularly attractive to telecommunications operators who are tying to keep up with developments in communications services creation environments.

Future Internet Assembly (Bled, March/April 2008)

The TSSG is at the heart of EU funded research into the Future Internet. The TSSG also has Irish funding (from the HEA and SFI that funds related basic research into the management of future networks). The TSSG was well represented at the recent event in Slovenia: Future Internet Assembly (31st March - 2nd April 2008). This post tries to summarise TSSG Future Internet activity, EU-funded and Irish-funded, and how this range of expertise links to events like the one in Bled.

The key point of this posting is to illustrate how the TSSG is at the centre of Future Internet activity in Europe. In addition to the active projects, and participation in the EU Technology Platforms, the TSSG has also led the way in building events that integrate the North American view of the Future Internet with the European view, in particular through the TridentCom event (held this year in Austria in March, chaired by Miguel ponce de Leon, and next year in Washington DC) chaired by our colleague and visiting Professor in Waterford IT, Thomas Magadanz (Fraunhofer FOKUS and the Technical University of Berlin).

The TSSG's engagement in Future Internet activities builds upon our prior experience in communications infrastructure and services (and in particular the management challenges of heterogeneous environments including wireless access networks), and our experience in EU FP4, FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects from 1996-2008.

Continue reading "Future Internet Assembly (Bled, March/April 2008)"