Sunflower
Credit: riandreu

Living things form “pockets of resistance” to the force of entropy. They do this through syntropy, or negentropy, which is the entropy we export to reduce our internal entropy; in other words, it’s the waste energy we generate to keep our soma in an organized working state. We collect the sun’s waste energy and use it to organize ourselves through syntropy.

How Much Information Entropy?
Credit: Moi

In Information Systems, entropy, known as Shannon entropy for Claude Shannon, is the measure of uncertainty in a random variable. A coin toss has one bit of entropy for the 50/50 chance of it turning up heads or tails, 0 or 1. A six-sided dice carries three bits of entropy for the possible outcomes it may produce with each roll (1 (000), 2 (001), 3 (010), 4 (011), 5 (100), 6 (101)). The weather has an amount of entropy difficult to quantify, but it varies from location to location. The weather in New York has more entropy than the weather in Southern California because Southern California has a more consistent climate. Similarly, in our first example, if we were dealing with a rigged coin, one that turned up heads more often than tails, then there would be less than one bit of entropy in each coin toss because we would expect heads more frequently than tails.

On the face of it, the only thing in common with the thermodynamic and information theory definitions is that entropy is a measure of disorder, but the two are analogous in other ways. In our thermodynamic Universe things move toward a state of increasing entropy, and a similar tendency towards a state of total uniformity occurs in an information system, only in reverse.

A living organism in an information system starts out in a world of absolute entropy, nothing is known. As that life interacts with its Universe, the amount of entropy in the Universe decreases for that being, and the amount of its internal entropy increases as what it knows becomes more of a variable to its peers. As the beings living in an information system decrease the entropy of their universe, it tends toward a state of absolute syntropy, absolute predictability.

We exist in a thermodynamic system, and it powers the information systems in our brains, the information systems we construct, and the information system these combine to form in our civilization. The increase of syntropy in an information system comes at the cost of an increase of entropy in the thermodynamic system powering it. Our thermodynamic system is winding down, a bad thing for us, but our information system is becoming increasingly more sophisticated, more syntropic. This brings a deeper insight to H.G. Wells’ prescient observation: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

Notes:

Defining Printer-Friendly Design

First we need to define the differences between design for the screen and design for print. Computer monitors and mobile phones are very different media from paper, even when displaying static content. Screens are backlit, while paper is reflective. Web development for the screen must take into account screen resolutions, while presentation on paper must consider page dimensions and toner consumption.

Jennifer Kyrnin has a definitive list of print-friendly attributes, changes that should be made to web content before outputting it to the printed document. Here are the three I find most important, but the list can get much longer depending on your needs:

1. Eliminate dark backgrounds and darken font colors presented over them.
2. Do something with links, either display full URLs, emphasize the text, or remove them altogether.
3. Remove headers, footers, side menus, and advertising.

Server-Side Solutions

One strategy for handling both print and screen layouts of a web page is to have two methods for building the page on the server. For example, w3schools’ “PRINT” button at the bottom of each page opens a new window/tab accessing the same page, but with an “output=print” variable added to the end of the URL, which the VBScript accesses via a GET method. When the VBScript detects the “print” flag, it builds the page without all the extraneous content.

w3schools Regular and Print View

Pros:

1. Provides a perma-link for users to reference the main content of your page without extraneous information.
2. Provides a primitive type of Print Preview functionality for the user.
3. Setting up your application to display print-friendly pages in this way sets it up to display other cool things, like XML versions and REST services.

Cons:

1. Print view must be turned on manually, doesn’t automatically render a print-version of the page for printers.
2. We are making a return trip to the server, and probably a database hit too, in order to get information we are already displaying on the screen.
3. Provides a perma-link for users to bypass your advertising and menus when referencing your content.

Strictly CSS Solutions

Another technique involves applying cascading style sheets to targeted mediums. In the example below, the first CSS file describes the page display, while the second css file describes the page display for printers specifically:


<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="screen.css" />

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media="print" />



Alternatively, you can use the @media Rule with an inline style like so:


<style type="text/css">
@media screen
{
body {font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:12px;}
}
@media print
{
body {font-family:times,serif;font-size:10px;}
}
@media screen,print
{
body {font-weight:bold;}
}
</style>



Using this strategy involves identifying all of the items on the page we don’t want printed and setting their styles to “display: none;” so that they appear on our screen, but don’t appear in our print outs.

Pros:

1. The same URL automatically renders the page in screen- or print-appropriate layouts depending on the device rendering it.
2. There is no “print” button or link cluttering up the page, the functionality is abstracted cleanly away from the user.

Cons:

1. Having a print.css file with media=”print” is a violation of the DRY principle. It leads to maintaining duplicate code. It’s better to use one CSS file and bracket print and view-specific design choices in @media tags.
2. Means having to put ID attributes around all the content you don’t want to display in order to hide it from the print view.
3. Takes some control away from the user, makes it inconvenient for people who want to save your page electronically. I don’t print web pages. I feel it defeats the purpose of using computers. So I like to pull up the print-version of a page in my web browser and save just the article. @media=”print” means I have to File>Print and then save electronically in some BS proprietary format instead of html.

JavaScript Solutions

With some JavaScript-driven DOM manipulation, you can come up with a function that will provide a pop-up window “print preview” that displays just the content on the page that you want printable. The following openPrintView() function accepts the id of the html element you want to display in a printable view. This function then uses the printFormat() function to strip the links out of the text provided it.


<script type="text/javascript">
/**
* Strips HREF tags from an html string.
* Can be modified to strip other tags as well.
*/
function printFormat(html)
{
var container = document.createElement("div");
container.innerHTML = html;
var newHTML = container.innerHTML.toString();
var anchors = container.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++)
{
var hrefcontainer = document.createElement("div");
hrefcontainer.appendChild(
anchors[i].cloneNode(true)
);
var href = hrefcontainer.innerHTML.toString();
var text = anchors[i].innerHTML.toString();
newHTML = newHTML.replace(href,text);
}
return newHTML;
}
/**
* @param html: The block of html to be displayed in the print window.
*/
function openPrintView(content)
{
// specify window parameters
printWin = window.open
(
"",
"print",
"width=600,height=450,status,scrollbars"
+ ",resizable,screenX=20,screenY=40"
+ ",left=20,top=40"
);
// write content to window
printWin.document.write('<html><head>');
printWin.document.write('<link rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">');
printWin.document.write('</head><body>');
printWin.document.write('<span id="printcontrols" style="float:right;">');
printWin.document.write('<a href="javascript:window.print();">print</a>');
printWin.document.write(' | <a href="javascript:window.close();">close</a>');
printWin.document.write('</span>');
printWin.document.write
(
printFormat(
document.getElementById(content).innerHTML)
);
printWin.document.write('</body></html>');
printWin.document.close();
printWin.focus();
}
</script>



You can then apply a style rule to hide just the print controls in the new window:


<style type="text/css">
@media print
{
#printcontrols
{
display:none;
}
}
</style>



Pros:

1. Uses an inclusion rather than exclusion strategy. You can grab other elements off the page using parent.getElementById() methods and writing them into the window. This way, when new elements are added to the page, there is no need to modify the print CSS to exclude them.
2. Can be used to strike a balance between presentation control and user control. The JavaScript references just the block of html you want to print, so on a page displaying multiple articles or reports, the user can pop-up a print-view of just the section they want.
3. Can serve as a “Print Preview” function for slicker web browsers, like Google Chrome, that don’t have that feature.

Cons:

1. No permalink with this method (A permalink could be provided with JavaScript that reformats the page onload, but that’s klugey.)
2. Like the server-side solution, this must be triggered.

While this last method is my preference because I’m a JavaScript geek, each of these methods is valid. Depending on your skill set and aesthetic, any of these, or a combination of two can serve your visitors well.

With Google’s aquisition of Metaweb the searchopolis takes a stake in the seemingly-forever-emerging Semantic Web, a concept with endlessly verbose standards and few demonstrable applications for all it promises. I yawned when I read of Google’s move, remembering a few years ago when I explored Freebase, Metaweb’s semantic database. I even tried downloading and playing with their semantically-rich database version of Wikipedia… and was really unimpressed. It was 3GB of schemas, xml, and ontology, seeming to add up to little of practical value.

Was I ever wrong. I returned to the database this last weekend and found a community of several hundred users maintaining a browsable schema, with some of these volunteer ontologists having contributed millions of facts to the database the same way people devote thousands of hours to maintaining Wikipedia. On its surface, the database just seems like a bunch of web pages, you click through the associations as you would on Wikipedia, with articles and entries leading into each other in standard hypertext fashion.

Where the value of semantic associations comes into play is when you experiment with the Freebase Query Editor, where you can search for data in explicit detail, tailoring it to your specific needs. For example, with the following query I can get a list of computer scientists born before 1950:


[{
"b:type": "/computer/computer_scientist",
"date_of_birth": null,
"date_of_birth<=": "1950",
"education": [{
"institution": null,
"id": null
}],
"name": null,
"id": null,
"type": "/people/person"
}]



A slight modification, and we can restrict the list to just those scientists affiliated with Harvard:


[{
"b:type": "/computer/computer_scientist",
"date_of_birth": null,
"date_of_birth<=": "1950",
"education": [{
"institution": "Harvard University",
"id": null
}],
"name": null,
"id": null,
"type": "/people/person"
}]



This is a person-instigated search, but Freebase offers many ways for other applications to take advantage of its data. With REST services provided by Freebase, we can run JSON queries to inform our web applications like so:

http://api.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?query={%22query%22:{%22type%22:%20%22/people/person%22,%22
b:type%22:%22/computer/computer_scientist%22,%22name%22:[],%22
date_of_birth%22:[]}}

Or, if you prefer XML, try Freebase’s RDF Browser, where I queried for Isaac Asimov in RDF and got back a huge amount of semantic data. Currently the API only allows a measly 100kb of data downloading 100k of HTTP requests a day, but with Google’s backing, this database could start providing semantically-rich data to applications all over the World Wide Web.

I know Google will keep it free, the company’s business model is built entirely on the universe of free stuff online, and since most of the content in the database is fueled by Wikipedia, it’s in the commons. I trust Google will increase Freebase’s accessibility, making it so everyone can play mashup games with the data, just as they did with Google Maps. And, of course, Google will reap incredible benefits to the services they already provide with this acquisition, meaning it’s a good time to invest in GOOG.

Every time a new device comes around, the self-proclaimed techsperts start declaring the death of older devices. It’s boring to keep hearing critics say things like the Smartphone is the “death of laptops,” the Kindle is the “death of books,” and the iPad is the “death of PCs” and the “death of e-Readers.”

Eken M001 Android Tablet
Credit: mrbill

I can see the iPad being nice for lying on the couch, flipping through websites and comic books, or playing relaxing video games that aren’t too intense. As appealing a toy as it is, I don’t find it very hard to resist buying the Android tablet equivalent. I get whatever it could provide me between my existing devices, my laptop, e-reader, and Smartphone. Like a lot of other technologies on display at Best Buy, the tablet pc doesn’t fit any particular need in my life.

IBM Portable Personal Computer
Credit: br1dotcom

The idea tablet-pc will replace the personal computer is just silly. For being productive, a sit-up, lean-forward device like the workstation, with a keyboard and a mouse for faster input, is the best medium. I suggest anyone who thinks the iPad will replace the laptop try coding for eight hours on one.

Flashbacks Arcade
Credit: goodrob13

Likewise, the tablet-pc won’t replace the Xbox, Nintendo, or Playstation either. Those are also lean-forward media. People don’t lay back for a nice relaxing afternoon of first-person shooters, they lean forward to kick-ass. Hardcore gaming requires a gaming console, with a ergonomic controller, big-screen TV, and sound-system. That’s why PCs are no longer the best medium for gaming either; you want to lean forward on your couch, not upright at a desk.

Microfische
Credit: Mosman Library

The Kindle and Sony e-Reader aren’t going anywhere either. Tablet PCs are not quite relaxing enough and lacks sufficient battery life to completely fill this niche. The liquid ink display is a much more relaxing medium than a backlit display, making the e-reader more conducive to the lengthy, meditative attention novels demand. Plus I can take my e-Reader on a week-long camping trip and catch up on my summer-reading without having to worry about recharging.

Prehistoric Life, The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth
DK Publishing

The e-reader won’t replace all the books either. There’s no tablet or e-reader with a screen large enough to replicate Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Curiosities or Prehistoric. I can’t imagine an electronic device that would replace the coffee table book, unless it were a screen built into the surface of a coffee table or an absurdly large and cumbersome tablet.

Telefunken U-1465 Radio
Credit: GonchoA

We live in a world of increasingly specialized techofauna. As our options for digital solutions increases, the market share each new device can claim grows smaller. The long tail is getting ever longer. The tablet pc, e-book reader, and Smartphone are all niche items, rather than serve all our needs as they are advertised, they serve increasingly specialized needs. Any of these devices can serve as our phone, web browser, game console, mp3 player, video player, personal planner, etc, etc, but each of them provides varying degrees of comfort in our consumption of those services.

None of these are the death of the PC, put they do make the PC into more of a niche item, serving a specific, lean-forward purpose for productivity, just like my light-weight, thumb-sized MP3 player accompanies me on my morning jog, my FM radio accompanies me on my ride to work, my workstation keeps me focused all day at work, while video displays keep me entertained on the cardio machines at the gym afterwards, and my Smartphone serves as a niche-item for keeping me entertained while I stand in line at the grocery store. : )

Abstraction Guy

“We really need a Factory Pattern for that Factory Pattern.”
Pros: Produces really really really loosely-coupled systems.
Cons: Output will never escape the layers of code.

Buzzword Bumbler

“This enterprise needs to move to a service-oriented paradigm in the cloudplex to encapsulate polydactylism!”
Pros: Impresses the heck out of people who don’t know better.
Cons: Someone will eventually call bullshit.
Note: For fun try putting two in the same room to watch them throw nonsense at one another.

Bleeding Edge

“Why don’t we just replace the company phonelist spreadsheet with a FOAF browser plugged into an object database?”
Pros: Thinks outside the box.
Cons: Must regularly be beaten back into the box.

Standards Sociopath

“I’m auditing the process, not the person, and this person is not following the process!”
Pros: Will keep your organization ISO 9000 compliant.
Cons: Will make it so that’s all your organization does.

The Local Guru

“Oh yeah, this bug is usually caused when a stray cosmic ray flips a bit in the system. I’ve got a workaround for it.”
Pros: Knows every little odd detail about the system bits-to-gigabits.
Cons: Probably put a lot those odd details in the system to begin with.

Cargo Cultist

“Can you help me debug this script I got from scriptkiddies.ru?”
Pros: Great at finding existing solutions online.
Cons: Will copy 10,000 lines of code into a program to make use of a custom replace() function on line 437 rather than figure out the regex themselves.

Workaholic

“Going home already? Must be nice…”
Pros: Work ethic of steel.
Cons: Works harder, not smarter.

Fanboy/Fangirl

“This would be so much more [efficient, elegant, convenient] in [Ruby, Python, .Net, etc]!!!”
Pros: Really knows their solution of choice in and out.
Cons: It’s never the solution for the project you’re currently working on.

Google Whiz

“The answer is.. (tappa-tappa-tappa) …42!”
Pros: Can find the answer to absolutely anything online.
Cons: Will blackmail you over those photos from the party last weekend.

The Theorist

“Did you see the new min max algorithm in this month’s Communications of the ACM? It saves three steps over the current standard!”
Pros: Produces lots of White Papers on fantastic, revolutionary solutions using pseudo code.
Cons: Never produces a line of actual code.
Warning: Not to be teamed up with Bleeding Edge.

The Train Wreck

“Should I have put a WHERE clause on that delete statement?”
Pros: Means well.
Cons: Feeling sorry for them prevents proper dismissal.

The Curmudgeon

“Object-Oriented, shmobject-Oriented, it’s all just assembly when you get down to it!”
Pros: Lot’s of great stories about the “old-days” of punchcards and renting time on mainframes.
Cons: Will use Fortran as pseudo code and give it to you to figure out in implementation.

Linux Elitist

“Software crash? That’s what you get for selling out to the Evil Empire. Sniff.”
Pros: Will save you tons of money on software licenses.
Cons: Will cost you tons of money on software maintenance.

ReWrite Renegade

“Instead of fixing the input, we should just rewrite the whole Cobalt application in .NET.”
Pros: Has fantastic vision.
Cons: Has fantasy vision.

Normalization Nazi

“I pulled the area codes out of the customer_phone table and migrated them to a phone_area_code table and added an id to reference them. You’ll need to modify all the database views and procedures.”
Pros: Might actually achieve the fabled 6NF.
Cons: Database will grind to a halt from all the cascades and rule-fired procedures that go off each time you update a record.

Documentation Dip

“The variable $i is used as a counter in the following FOR loop which…”
Pros: Makes it look like your team is really good a documenting their code.
Cons: Makes your team look like they can’t read code.

1-Up

“I found an unused variable in that class you just checked in… I prefer not to have such inefficiencies in my code, but that’s just me.”
Pros: Keeps an internal scorecard of every error every other programmer has made in the organization.
Cons: Isn’t keeping a scorecard on his or herself.

Note: These are caricatures of people, stereotypes, not real people. If you know me personally, please don’t think any of these were inspired by you. : )

Before various media dimbulbs perverted it to be synonymous with “criminal act,” the word “hack” was a geek term that meant “an appropriate application of ingenuity.” A “hacker” was someone particularly adept at pushing the limits of a system, finding the flaws in it to make it stronger, and discovering new ways to use existing systems for both fun and productivity.

This last weekend Vicky and I took part in the Random Hacks of Kindess 1.0 event in Washington D.C., where code-monkeys and other IT professionals teamed up with assorted Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to craft solutions to pressing needs. The event was sponsored by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, with other events being simultaneously held around the world in Jakarta, Nairobi, Sydney and elsewhere. Developers around the world were able to coordinate via online collaboration and streaming video on open-source solutions to pressing humanitarian needs.

Wireframe Room Names

The format for the weekend was delightfully emergent. A floor of conference rooms was provided and everyone was told to get to it, take a room and post your project needs on the door. I walked a lap through the hallways, looking at posters requesting python, SMS experience, and other skill sets, but no PHP (.NET was fairly absent too). I finally wandered into a room with a team discussing the construction of an online presence for the Arlington CERT Chapter and other local CERT teams.

As a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) member myself, I figured I could contribute to this endeavor; however, a lack of clearly defined requirements and a hodge-podge of existing, uncoordinated web efforts soon dampened everyone’s enthusiasm. While there is a Federal presence for CERT, a representative from FEMA explained that they are heavily restricted in their interactions with state CERT teams (We also learned the reason FEMA isn’t helping to clean up the Gulf Oil spill is because states would have to pay $0.25 on the dollar for the help, while they expect full compensation from BP). At the same time, there was little coordination between state and local CERT teams, with local CERT teams having to build their own web sites and state’s having their own CERT websites, with no interaction between states.

We all agreed there was a problem here. CERT Teams in various states and localities need a single place on the Web to coordinate. An online tool would provide a place for CERT organizers to manage their memberships, certifications, coordinate with other groups, coordinate resources, and manage tasking. This was not an insurmountable amount to accomplish, especially with tools and frameworks to jumpstart development; however, with an official SME and an established customer buy-in, there was too much concern that we would (1) get the requirements wrong and (2) build something that no one would use. I and several others quietly snuck away at lunchtime to find other projects, but a few developers stuck with it and produced a fairly comprehensive outline of what an online application should provide to CERT Teams nationwide (although, I’m curious if the upcoming Diaspora social networking tool could be modified to fit the bill).

ReUnite Android

So after some more wandering around, I got a text from Vicky that she was immersed in coding a Google Android application, and that I could join her if I needed something to work on. The ReUnite application is an existing iPhone app developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that allows users to take photos of people and post them with contact information to the NLM’s missing person’s database. Vicky was working with Dr. Glenn Pearson to recreate the application for the Android platform.

Vicky, Dr. Pearson, and Me

Vicky got all the form screens laid-out, data capturing in session for them, an image gallery, automated e-mails, and got started on web services. I set up my development environment, got a splash screen done, a confirmation screen, and a placeholder for the main menu since we switched strategies from SQLite to XML for data persistence… not that I had gotten very far in figuring out the SQLite functionality. Not too bad for two programmers inexperienced with the development environment coding for a combined 30 hours (Vicky – 18, Me – 12). We have uploaded the code to a Github repository, with a ToDo list of where work needs to go on it. We hope to eventually get back to the project; however, we encourage other developers to take a look too.

First Prize Team and Award

The wrap-up for the weekend involved all the different teams presenting their 16 different projects in five minutes or less each. There were lots of fantastic ideas falling along a wide range of progress made and degrees of complexity, but one project stood head-and-shoulders above the rest, and application for geological surveyors to enter data in the field about mountain-slopes to assess the risk of mud-slides that included some fantastic data visualization tools. A SME had announced her need for help with the project at the RHoK kick-off meeting, and had brought sample data from what the surveyors were currently entering, which involved lengthy rows of numbers painstakingly entered into text documents. In the conversation-buzz leading up to the award ceremony, the consensus was that the project should easily win for delivering a complete comprehensive application and tackling a need that prevented crises from occurring instead of just responding after the fact (It was also really neato for using an algorithm originally written in Fortran).

Breakfast

Overall, the weekend was a hugely satisfying experience. Vicky and I got to engage in rewarding work that also presented a fantastic learning opportunity, and appreciated the fact that events like these go a long way towards reclaiming the true meaning of the word “hack.” My only regret was a discussion session in the Crisis Camp that didn’t happen. It had the most intriguing title that got my imaginative wheels spinning: “Rebooting Academia after a Crisis.” Maybe next year. : )

There are two kinds of inquisitive minds, Hedgehogs and Foxes. In nature, Foxes rely on a wide range of crafty strategies to avoid prey. Hedgehogs rely on one tried and true defense, rolling up into a ball and baring their quills. Intellectually, Foxes dart from topic to topic, surveying a wide range of ideas across a broad spectrum of research fields. Bill Nye, Science Guy and other science popularizers are good examples of the fox scientist. Hedgehogs hunker down into one topic and research thoroughly. Your typical graduate student working on their thesis is a hedgehog.

For its first four years, I used this blog as a sounding board for articulating what I thought about politics, philosophy, and science. For the last three years, ideonexus has been a fox science blog, darting from subject to subject in the realm of empirical observations and journaling what I learned in all of them. For awhile now, my intellectual interests have been gravitating to computer science, as have my non-link blog posts. When I come home, I want to write programming code and read essays and articles about information technology. So the daily links have become a distraction, a minor one, but one that takes a little time from my being a hedgehog computer scientist.

In finding the stories that most interest me, I had to give up on RSS readers because there was too much noise in the way they homogenize data, so I visited lots of my favorite news sites daily. Here are the links to my favorite and useful science web sites. I’ll keep visiting them for relaxation, and I hope you’ll support them too:

The Best Science News Sites

ABC (Australia) Science
Air & Space Magazine
Ars Technica
BBC SciTech News
Cosmos News
Discover
Discovery News
Edge
Economist Science
LiveScience
National Geographic News
National Public Radio (US)
Natural History Magazine
New York Times Science
New Yorker Science
Popular Mechanics
Popular Science
R&D Magazine
Scientific American
Seed Magazine
Science News
Smithsonian
USA Today Science
US News & World Report Science
Wired News

The Best Science Blogs

Chet Raymo
Rationally Speaking
Schrodinger’s Kitten
The Technium

Good Science News (with a Caveat)

The caveat is that some of these sites publish press releases uncritically, have a strong philosophical or political bias, or demand a subscription to read their articles (look for the NYTimes to make this list next year).

EurekAlert!
Futurity
h+
Mother Jones Environment
New Scientist
PhysOrg
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Science Daily
Slashdot Science
Space.com