I do not know anything about the Outbox startup other than what is presented in the linked article, but I do know that this is not an accurate representation of the approach of the Post Office to electronic mail. They considered a system almost exactly like this in the late 1970s. It was called E-Com, and it allowed users to send letters electronically from office to office. The letters were then printed out and delivered.
The Post Office might have its flaws, but from the 1792 Post Office Act to the present, it has actually been an important contributor to the information infrastructure of the United States. This article reads like a press release from the start-up in question.
There is apparently a long history of the use of aptitude tests in the selection of programmers. From a 1965 article in Datamation on programmer recruitment: "Creativity is a major attribute of technically oriented people," suggested one representative profile. "Look for those who like intellectual challenge rather than interpersonal relations or managerial decision-making. Look for the chess player, the solver of mathematical puzzles." There is a little piece from the "computer boys" history site above has some funny images from this period.
A lot of replies to this seem to be dismissing it as irrelevant. Yes, social networks are not private. But determining aspects of your identity that you yourself do not choose to post can have serious implications. Project Gaydar at MIT showed that it was possible to determine sexual orientation via social networks. In many parts of the world, including the US, this matters. As might information about what preexisting medical conditions you might have...
From a 1959 article describing "How no-talent singers get 'talent'":
"Recording techniques have become so ingenious that almost anyone can seem to be a singer. A small, flat voice can be souped up by emphasizing the low frequencies and piping the result through an echo chamber. A slight speeding up a the recording tape can bring a brighter, happier sound to a naturally drab singer or clean the weariness out of a tired voice. Wrong notes can be snipped out of the tape and replaced by notes taken from other parts of the tape. Almost every pop recording made today , even by well established talents, carries some evidence of he use of echo chambers, tape reverberation, over-dubbing, or splicing"
In their recent book, Who Controls the Internet, law professors Timothy Wu and Jack Goldsmith have a nice section on China. Their argument is that effective control does not require total control. Yes, it is possible for internet users in China to circumvent government controls, but as long as these controls work well enough for the average user -- who as other commentators have noted, have other concerns and priorities -- then the Chinese government has effective control. An educated Western user who has certain expectations for the internet, and who has the technical resources necessary to access proxies, can perhaps (relatively) easily bypass government controls. But that does not mean that these controls, combined with logging and fear of reprisals, are not very effective.
And, of course, China is a large market for many firms, and therefore the Chinese government has leverage to exert their influence over a set of intermediaries -- Yahoo and Google, for example -- to make their control effective (again, not perfect).
The source of the theory of "third places" is Roy Oldenberg's book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, which has been around for quite some time. Sherry Turkle, in her Life on the Screen, also references Oldenberg.
Credit where credit is due. Here is a nice summary of Oldenberg's work.
Frederick Brooks said it best in the introduction to The Mythical Man-Month:
"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure-thought stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."
The reality is, however, that most scientific experiments are not reproduced. In some cases this is because the equipment or techniques required is unique to a particular lab, but mostly because there is no percentage in it -- you don't build a scientific career or garner grant money by reproducing someone else's experiments. Most scientific data is taken on trust.
This is not to say that it is often not reliable -- there are many social mechanisms built into scientific practice that help assure that scientists are trustworthy.
But the notion that peer review assures truth and the idea that experiments could in theory be replicated are more ideals than realities.
This is not the first study of scientists that has revealed the tremendous pressures to produce that at times cause a surprising number of them to violate what we think of as scientific norms.
There is a interesting little book called "The trouble with Dilbert : how corporate culture gets the last laugh," by Norman Solomon that is an extended polemic on the ways in which Scott Adams has allegedly become a tool for the corporate overlords. The basic argument is that by making slightly-but-not-too subversive cracks at modern corporate life Dilbert defuses potentially revolutionary worker resentment. We all recognize our own feelings of helplessness, laugh a little, feel as if we are "sticking to the man" by posting our favorite PHB cartoon on the cubicle wall, and then go on with life without ever substantially challenging the structures of modern capitalism.
Keep in mind also that Edwin Black's book "IBM and the Holocaust" has been negatively reviewed by most historians of computing, European history, and business history. He plays fast and loose with his sources, and the book was an obvious and deliberate ploy in a set of lawsuits aimed at recovering assets from a variety of firms.
This is not to say that international corporations are often complicit in atrocious activities. But this is not one of those stories.
No, she did not. What she did do was write an insightful and articulate review of Babbage's work that is often seen in retrospect as a description of what a computer program might do.
But Babbage's machine was never built and no program was ever written for it.
An even more appropriate companion to this book would be Susan Douglas' Inventing American Broadcasting. It has a fascinating chapter on amateur radio operators that reads like a pre-history of computer hackers. She describes how these operators -- young, adolescent, middle-class boys obsessed with a technology for technology's sake -- provided a critical mass for broadcast radio (which had a chicken-and-egg problem -- without an established base of users no-one wanted to develop broadcast stations). The parallels with the early personal computer industry are striking. Although she does not make the point explicitly, Douglas implies that hacker culture is not as unique (at least as modern) as we sometimes make she. She explains it as part of a larger set of structural and cultural changes that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. A good read.
Your daughter's health teacher would probably love to see you explain human reproduction to a group of thirty giggling adolescents. So you now what recursion is. Big deal. You have specialized technical skills - so do teachers, mechanics, nurses, and a whole set of undervalued professions. Do they lack "no brain power, time investment, skill, or personal drive to accomplish?" I doubt it. That is in fact the point of most posts in this topic: namely, that programmers and other IT folks are undervalued. Suggesting that people get what they deserve is therefore counterproductive in this context (as well as obviously untrue).
Finally, at least being a teacher requires (at least in public schools) a four-year degree. Programming does not. By your logic, it is your daughter's health teacher who should be complaining, not you.
Part of the problem with this and most other studies of IT labor issues (markets, salaries, job satisfaction, etc.) is that it does not differentiate between different types of IT labor. Often IT is taken to include a wide range of jobs that vary from tech support to network administration to programming. The category is so broad as to be almost meaningless. There is an enormous difference between the type of work (and the people who do it, how much they get paid, etc.) done by systems programmers and that done by call-center tech support staff.
The difference is that we have mechanisms for dealing with doctors that misbehave: licensing, malpractice litigation, etc. They may not be perfect mechanisms, but the combination of strict controls on entry to the profession and legal and professional tools for punishing malfeasance, people generally have enough confidence in their doctors to make the system work.
There are no such controls for software developers, no comparable licensing structures, and absolutely no established mechanisms but punishing gross negligence.
This was another intangible value provided by a print encyclopedia. Right or wrong, it was perceived that the authority of a reputable publisher was behind each article.
Unlike the web, where any idiot (or ideologue) can self-publish. (This post being a case in point). Makes it very difficult to authenticate "valid" information.
All of this discussion assumes that the sole purpose of owning an encyclopedia is information access.
Many middle-class households (the only ones who could afford a traditional print encyclopedia) bought them for their symbolic value: they showed that you were reasonably well-educated, that you valued education, that you could afford encyclopedias. They also bought them because of pressure not to "let your kids get behind" in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
These are precisely the reasons that many parents bought (and continue to buy) home computers. Just look at how personal computeres were marketed in the early 1980s, when it was not at all clear why you would want one. Look at how they are marketed to parents today.
Except, of course, for the people that influenced the PARC researchers - such as JCR Licklider at the DARPA ("Man-Machine Symbiosis" was published in 1960), Douglas Englebart's Augmentation Research Center, and others.
Great leap forwards make good copy, but rarely happen -- particularly in the history of technology.
Profiles in Courage was ghost-written by Joseph Kennedy's (JFK's dad and former Prohibition-era bootlegger turned politician) staff workers. Real statesmanly.
Re:what about the technologies ? legal issues?
on
Dealers of Lightning
·
· Score: 1
Hiltzik shows how Apple engineers - particularly Jeff Raskin - were aware of what was going at PARC in terms of GUI research. They were reading all of the PARC research. These engineers encouraged Jobs to facilitate a visit, and in fact Apple "traded" Xerox the opportunity to buy into their IPO for $1 million in return for a complete tour of their new GUI developments.
Quite a different picture from how this story is usually presented.
Re:Another source of hacker history
on
Hacker Culture
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In her book on the origins of the broadcasting industy (Inventing American Broadcasting), the historian Susan Douglas provides an excellent chapter on the amateur radio operators of the early decades of the 20th century. These were young men who begged, borrowed and stole to construct cool but essentially useless technologies (sound familiar?), used them to show off to their friends, chat idly, and piss off authorities at Marconi Wireless and the US Navy. If you were to replace the word amateur radio operator with the word hacker it would read like a chapter from Steve Levy - except that Douglas provides a more critical (in the good way) of this phenomenon. She argues that is reflect shifts in the job market (an increase in white-collar, technologically oriented occupations), changing notions of masculinity (based on mastery of technology rather than physical prowess), etc.
An excellent read, and it provides a much-needed historical context for understanding hackers. A useful counter to the usual sensational literature (hacker as genius, hacker as criminal, hacker as arrested adolescent, hacker as cowboy), etc.
Listen, we all know that programming can be an enjoyable and rewarding (personally and financially). The question is whether or not programmers face limited career options as they get older - perhaps because there is not an established career path for programmers, or because managers perceive it to be more cost effective to hire younger replacements, etc.
It does seem to be true that historically computer programmers have found themselves outside of traditional career paths. I know that in 1968 the ACM SIGCPR (Special Interest Group on Computer Personnel Research) issued a report that argued that
"There is a tendency for programming to be a `dead-end' profession for many individuals, who, no matter how good they are as programmers, will never make the transitioni nto a supervisory slot. And, in too manyi nstances this is the only road to advancement."
It is not difficult to find more contemporary researchers making similar claims. Again, the argument is not that programming is a poor career choice, but whether or not programmers - as compared to engineers, for example - are able to move upwards within a traditional corporate hierarchy. The evidence suggests that this indeed may be true. It might be true for the wrong reasons, but it still might be true.
My favorite is the profile of contributor "Diamond" Jack Holgroth:
"Diamond" Jack Holgroth is a Game Theoretician who currently teaches a course in Advanced Game Theory for Theologians at Fellowship University. He served our country during the Cold War as a Game Theory Tactician for the Department of Defense and single-handedly developed an elegant solution to the "Fisherman's Quandary", a game theory problem that was crucial to the winning of the arms race and that was famously intractable - until Diamond Jack came along.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not know anything about the Outbox startup other than what is presented in the linked article, but I do know that this is not an accurate representation of the approach of the Post Office to electronic mail. They considered a system almost exactly like this in the late 1970s. It was called E-Com, and it allowed users to send letters electronically from office to office. The letters were then printed out and delivered.
The Post Office might have its flaws, but from the 1792 Post Office Act to the present, it has actually been an important contributor to the information infrastructure of the United States. This article reads like a press release from the start-up in question.
There is apparently a long history of the use of aptitude tests in the selection of programmers. From a 1965 article in Datamation on programmer recruitment: "Creativity is a major attribute of technically oriented people," suggested one representative profile. "Look for those who like intellectual challenge rather than interpersonal relations or managerial decision-making. Look for the chess player, the solver of mathematical puzzles." There is a little piece from the "computer boys" history site above has some funny images from this period.
A lot of replies to this seem to be dismissing it as irrelevant. Yes, social networks are not private. But determining aspects of your identity that you yourself do not choose to post can have serious implications. Project Gaydar at MIT showed that it was possible to determine sexual orientation via social networks. In many parts of the world, including the US, this matters. As might information about what preexisting medical conditions you might have...
The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...
There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self
You forgot Man vs. Civil War Era Cyborgs
From a 1959 article describing "How no-talent singers get 'talent'":
"Recording techniques have become so ingenious that almost anyone can seem to be a singer. A small, flat voice can be souped up by emphasizing the low frequencies and piping the result through an echo chamber. A slight speeding up a the recording tape can bring a brighter, happier sound to a naturally drab singer or clean the weariness out of a tired voice. Wrong notes can be snipped out of the tape and replaced by notes taken from other parts of the tape. Almost every pop recording made today , even by well established talents, carries some evidence of he use of echo chambers, tape reverberation, over-dubbing, or splicing"
Same old, same old...
In their recent book, Who Controls the Internet, law professors Timothy Wu and Jack Goldsmith have a nice section on China. Their argument is that effective control does not require total control. Yes, it is possible for internet users in China to circumvent government controls, but as long as these controls work well enough for the average user -- who as other commentators have noted, have other concerns and priorities -- then the Chinese government has effective control. An educated Western user who has certain expectations for the internet, and who has the technical resources necessary to access proxies, can perhaps (relatively) easily bypass government controls. But that does not mean that these controls, combined with logging and fear of reprisals, are not very effective.
And, of course, China is a large market for many firms, and therefore the Chinese government has leverage to exert their influence over a set of intermediaries -- Yahoo and Google, for example -- to make their control effective (again, not perfect).
The source of the theory of "third places" is Roy Oldenberg's book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, which has been around for quite some time. Sherry Turkle, in her Life on the Screen, also references Oldenberg. Credit where credit is due. Here is a nice summary of Oldenberg's work.
It was the mice, not the rabbits. They commissioned the whole thing.
Frederick Brooks said it best in the introduction to The Mythical Man-Month:
"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure-thought stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."
The reality is, however, that most scientific experiments are not reproduced. In some cases this is because the equipment or techniques required is unique to a particular lab, but mostly because there is no percentage in it -- you don't build a scientific career or garner grant money by reproducing someone else's experiments. Most scientific data is taken on trust.
This is not to say that it is often not reliable -- there are many social mechanisms built into scientific practice that help assure that scientists are trustworthy.
But the notion that peer review assures truth and the idea that experiments could in theory be replicated are more ideals than realities.
This is not the first study of scientists that has revealed the tremendous pressures to produce that at times cause a surprising number of them to violate what we think of as scientific norms.
There is a interesting little book called "The trouble with Dilbert : how corporate culture gets the last laugh," by Norman Solomon that is an extended polemic on the ways in which Scott Adams has allegedly become a tool for the corporate overlords. The basic argument is that by making slightly-but-not-too subversive cracks at modern corporate life Dilbert defuses potentially revolutionary worker resentment. We all recognize our own feelings of helplessness, laugh a little, feel as if we are "sticking to the man" by posting our favorite PHB cartoon on the cubicle wall, and then go on with life without ever substantially challenging the structures of modern capitalism.
It's Dilbert meets Marx. Fun stuff.
Keep in mind also that Edwin Black's book "IBM and the Holocaust" has been negatively reviewed by most historians of computing, European history, and business history. He plays fast and loose with his sources, and the book was an obvious and deliberate ploy in a set of lawsuits aimed at recovering assets from a variety of firms.
This is not to say that international corporations are often complicit in atrocious activities. But this is not one of those stories.
No, she did not. What she did do was write an insightful and articulate review of Babbage's work that is often seen in retrospect as a description of what a computer program might do.
But Babbage's machine was never built and no program was ever written for it.
An even more appropriate companion to this book would be Susan Douglas' Inventing American Broadcasting. It has a fascinating chapter on amateur radio operators that reads like a pre-history of computer hackers. She describes how these operators -- young, adolescent, middle-class boys obsessed with a technology for technology's sake -- provided a critical mass for broadcast radio (which had a chicken-and-egg problem -- without an established base of users no-one wanted to develop broadcast stations). The parallels with the early personal computer industry are striking. Although she does not make the point explicitly, Douglas implies that hacker culture is not as unique (at least as modern) as we sometimes make she. She explains it as part of a larger set of structural and cultural changes that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. A good read.
Your daughter's health teacher would probably love to see you explain human reproduction to a group of thirty giggling adolescents. So you now what recursion is. Big deal. You have specialized technical skills - so do teachers, mechanics, nurses, and a whole set of undervalued professions. Do they lack "no brain power, time investment, skill, or personal drive to accomplish?" I doubt it. That is in fact the point of most posts in this topic: namely, that programmers and other IT folks are undervalued. Suggesting that people get what they deserve is therefore counterproductive in this context (as well as obviously untrue).
Finally, at least being a teacher requires (at least in public schools) a four-year degree. Programming does not. By your logic, it is your daughter's health teacher who should be complaining, not you.
Part of the problem with this and most other studies of IT labor issues (markets, salaries, job satisfaction, etc.) is that it does not differentiate between different types of IT labor. Often IT is taken to include a wide range of jobs that vary from tech support to network administration to programming. The category is so broad as to be almost meaningless. There is an enormous difference between the type of work (and the people who do it, how much they get paid, etc.) done by systems programmers and that done by call-center tech support staff.
The difference is that we have mechanisms for dealing with doctors that misbehave: licensing, malpractice litigation, etc. They may not be perfect mechanisms, but the combination of strict controls on entry to the profession and legal and professional tools for punishing malfeasance, people generally have enough confidence in their doctors to make the system work.
There are no such controls for software developers, no comparable licensing structures, and absolutely no established mechanisms but punishing gross negligence.
This was another intangible value provided by a print encyclopedia. Right or wrong, it was perceived that the authority of a reputable publisher was behind each article.
Unlike the web, where any idiot (or ideologue) can self-publish. (This post being a case in point). Makes it very difficult to authenticate "valid" information.
All of this discussion assumes that the sole purpose of owning an encyclopedia is information access.
Many middle-class households (the only ones who could afford a traditional print encyclopedia) bought them for their symbolic value: they showed that you were reasonably well-educated, that you valued education, that you could afford encyclopedias. They also bought them because of pressure not to "let your kids get behind" in an increasingly competitive academic environment.
These are precisely the reasons that many parents bought (and continue to buy) home computers. Just look at how personal computeres were marketed in the early 1980s, when it was not at all clear why you would want one. Look at how they are marketed to parents today.
Except, of course, for the people that influenced the PARC researchers - such as JCR Licklider at the DARPA ("Man-Machine Symbiosis" was published in 1960), Douglas Englebart's Augmentation Research Center, and others.
Great leap forwards make good copy, but rarely happen -- particularly in the history of technology.
Profiles in Courage was ghost-written by Joseph Kennedy's (JFK's dad and former Prohibition-era bootlegger turned politician) staff workers. Real statesmanly.
Hiltzik shows how Apple engineers - particularly Jeff Raskin - were aware of what was going at PARC in terms of GUI research. They were reading all of the PARC research. These engineers encouraged Jobs to facilitate a visit, and in fact Apple "traded" Xerox the opportunity to buy into their IPO for $1 million in return for a complete tour of their new GUI developments.
Quite a different picture from how this story is usually presented.
In her book on the origins of the broadcasting industy (Inventing American Broadcasting), the historian Susan Douglas provides an excellent chapter on the amateur radio operators of the early decades of the 20th century. These were young men who begged, borrowed and stole to construct cool but essentially useless technologies (sound familiar?), used them to show off to their friends, chat idly, and piss off authorities at Marconi Wireless and the US Navy. If you were to replace the word amateur radio operator with the word hacker it would read like a chapter from Steve Levy - except that Douglas provides a more critical (in the good way) of this phenomenon. She argues that is reflect shifts in the job market (an increase in white-collar, technologically oriented occupations), changing notions of masculinity (based on mastery of technology rather than physical prowess), etc.
An excellent read, and it provides a much-needed historical context for understanding hackers. A useful counter to the usual sensational literature (hacker as genius, hacker as criminal, hacker as arrested adolescent, hacker as cowboy), etc.
Listen, we all know that programming can be an enjoyable and rewarding (personally and financially). The question is whether or not programmers face limited career options as they get older - perhaps because there is not an established career path for programmers, or because managers perceive it to be more cost effective to hire younger replacements, etc.
It does seem to be true that historically computer programmers have found themselves outside of traditional career paths. I know that in 1968 the ACM SIGCPR (Special Interest Group on Computer Personnel Research) issued a report that argued that
"There is a tendency for programming to be a `dead-end' profession for many individuals, who, no matter how good they are as programmers, will never make the transitioni nto a supervisory slot. And, in too manyi nstances this is the only road to advancement."
It is not difficult to find more contemporary researchers making similar claims. Again, the argument is not that programming is a poor career choice, but whether or not programmers - as compared to engineers, for example - are able to move upwards within a traditional corporate hierarchy. The evidence suggests that this indeed may be true. It might be true for the wrong reasons, but it still might be true.
My favorite is the profile of contributor "Diamond" Jack Holgroth:
"Diamond" Jack Holgroth is a Game Theoretician who currently teaches a course in Advanced Game Theory for Theologians at Fellowship University. He served our country during the Cold War as a Game Theory Tactician for the Department of Defense and single-handedly developed an elegant solution to the "Fisherman's Quandary", a game theory problem that was crucial to the winning of the arms race and that was famously intractable - until Diamond Jack came along.
Very clever, but also quite clearly a joke.