From Big Data to Long Data

Stephen Few on Big Data is worth a read. Remember the SOA years? Service Oriented Architecture? My biggest problem with SOA was - and is - that there is no sane, concise, consensus on what an SOA is. No yardstick that could be used to determine whether or not something claiming to be an SOA really had some agreed-upon set of attributes.

Now whatever else you might think of "structured programming" or "object oriented design" or "flow based programming", at least they have identifiable technical characteristics that are generally agreed upon. I have seen all of the following claimed as "SOA"s : Relational Databases, J2EE, SOAP/WSDL, synchronous and asynchronous method invocations, CORBA, DCOM, MQSeries....

I tried - and failed - back in the day, to promote the idea that asynchronous structured message passing is the key defining characteristic of an SOA. (I believe that synchronous invocation of functions/methods/services is the root of all evil at Internet scale, but that is another story for another day.)

Today, there is a real risk that Big Data will be as content-free as SOA turned out to be. That would be a shame. At the risk of repeating my SOA mistake by putting forth what I believe to be the defining characteristic of big data, I hereby asset that IMO, the modelling of *time* is what makes Big Data different from other data.

Gone are the days of "the backup". Gone are the days of Relational Models that just record "now". We can and should move to a model of computing in which history (last second, last hour, last year...) is a first class member of our models so that we can query and mine it for insights.

Samuel Arbesmen is on to something. Read this, then go read his book The Half-life of Facts.

ReinventLaw Silicon Valley 2013

My slides from my Ignite presentation.

ReinventLaw Silicon Valley 2013 from Sean McGrath

Memory lane...

Weird experience in some ways, walking around the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Provokes an interesting feeling that there isn't a word for in English. Maybe Ithkuil has a word for it...."The feeling you get looking at items in museum cases that you consider to have been current very recently. Too recently to be in a museum and the concomitant feeling that maybe you too, should be in the case staring out, rather than staring in."...Or something like that.

Here is the ZX80 they have on display....
That is where it all started for me. The start of a hopeless addiction you could say. An all consuming passion. Yes, both of those but also, all things considered....amazing, incredible fun. What a journey to have lived through and participated in. And its all changed so fast that there are already museums for this stuff....

ReInvent Law SiliconValley 2013

This should be fun. My talk will be about the information architecture needed for 21st century legal corpora. This article is a good starting point:
http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2012/11/16/digital-law-what-lawyers-need-to-learn-from-accountants/

A memorable date-time

Trying to post as close to ‎12/12/12 12:12:12 as I can so that my post on the occurrence of ‎12/12/12 12:12:12 would be at ‎12/12/12 12:12:12 central US time.

Bootstrapping

Reading news/blogs over the last couple of days has brought Doug Englebarts bootstrapping concepts forcefully back into my head. To make anything go exponential you need a feedback loop. Digital technologies like the Internet are arguably the most potent source of feedback loops every created by humankind as the effort (time/money etc.) required to create the loop is so small. The so-called "social" technologies are feedback loop enablers. We have basically turned feedback-looping into a platform and are now laying down all sorts of boot-strappable things onto this feedback-based substrate in order to benefit from the bootstrap effects that Doug Englebart wrote about.

When history is written, what will be considered the first digital social network to leverage bootstrap effects? Perhaps the collaboration/bootstrapping in the open source movement? After all, many of the mainstream social technologies of today would not exist if it were not for the enabling components buried in the software stack that came from open source component bootstrapping of yester-year.

The speed with which boostrapped phenomena grow is, of course, amazing once they build up a head of exponential steam. We are seeing some of that amazement in popular discourse today...amazement at tablet penetration rates, amazement at Android growth, amazement at how quickly a new *thing* can go from 0 to mainstream - and also mainstream to 0..., and of course, amazement at our own amazement.

When history is written I think 2012 will be remembered as the year when the next big thing in bootstrapping started to percolate into our collective consciousness. I speak of 3D printing. Why is this a game changer? Not because manufacturing of complex objects can now be done better/faster/cheaper than before. That is undoubtedly true.

No, what makes 3D printing fascinating is that we can now clearly envisage a future in which 3D printers are used to make....

.....3D printers.

Fasten your seatbelts all you bootstrappers out there. Doug Englebart, I hope you are enjoying watching all this unfold.

What Lawyers can learn from Accountants

Authentication of digital law...its all about the audit trails. See What Lawyers can learn from Accountants.