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I was watching the Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds Friday when they showed a short video during a break. It was called Shift Happens and had a profound message about educating the next generation. I searched YouTube, found it, and circulated the link to several colleagues. One colleague (my son Eric) replied that it was actually another YouTube video. Two identical videos? Hmmmm So, I investigated.
There are actually more than 20 variations. Here are some better ones:
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RXNWwGUsBU
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUsYFCfmNMo
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqfunyCeU5g
They all started in August of 2006 by Karl Fisch with a PowerPoint presentation to a group of teachers. The original title was Did You Know. Fisch's thoughts, along with his original materials, are available at...
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html
Scott McLeored remixed the Fisch material with better fonts, rewording, “upbeat” soundtrack, and YouTubed it! For details from McLeod, see...
http://scottmcleod.typepad.com/dangerouslyirrelevant/2007/01/gone_fischin.html
That was in January. It went viral! And, it has spawned many subsequent variations. The first link above has more than 2.4 million views!
The bottom line: This is a thought provoking video that is well worth 5 minutes of your time. In Fisch’s words, “I remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others.” In a delight way, I must say. It challenges many old notions of world order and technology. It is especially pertinent for educators of today’s youth. The world that these youth will experienced will be quite different than what we have experienced.
Oh, about Karl Fisch... He is a teacher at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, CO, just a few miles from where I live in Boulder. Global thoughts in a small world!
Over breakfast I had a delightful chat with Richard Buckle, an experienced, well-traveled student of the IT industry. He is quite a blogger, rather extensive in his comments and subtle (not!) in his humor. See his latest blogging creation.
An issue that surfaced amid our eggs and pancakes was the impact of Web 2.0 technology. I was relaying my perceptions from the IBM IOD Conference. In particular, I was surprised by IBM's emphasis of Web 2.0 as an essential part of future enterprise architectures. I even queried a panel of IBM executives on the sanity of executing such flaking technology on sacred mainframe systems.
The answer that I got involves the careful choosing of one's IT battles within the enterprise. Given the demands of today's global businesses and given the complexity of relevant information to the business, traditional IT has no hope to satisfy all those requirements. Doing IT as the same will result in a chaos far beyond the proliferation of user-created spreadsheet systems of the last decade. Using Web 2.0, leave the User Interface layer to the users, because each will want something different and will want it NOW.
Choose, instead, battle lines around supplying quality enterprise information through a Service Oriented Architecture organized by key business processes.
Hmmmm This is a new twist - a political one - to the whole SOA discussion. For more details, see Richard's blog.
In a briefing by Vertica today, I revisit a number of familiar database concepts, such as column-oriented store and data compression. The list of players involved with Vertica is very impressive, from Michael Stonebraker as founder and CTO to Don Haderle as an advisor. However, I wondered how a new DBMS vendor could emerge successfully in a market that is consolidating. The question that kept bugging me was...
What is new about Vertica that was not invented and commercialized decades ago?
It seems that the appropriate analogy is that of taking several old wines and blending them together in a new wine skin. Here are the old wines:
1) Column-oriented store, which is great on query performance but terrible on update/load performance
2) Data compression, which is great on size reduction (10% to 20% of the raw data) but terrible on compress/decompress processing
3) Multiple sort orders, which is great for forming multiple indexes for complex queries but terrible on duplicating data
4) Dual data spaces optimized for reading and writing respectfully, which is great for absorbing an update stream but terrible on the query engine to operate concurrently on two different structures.
Mixed thoroughly together and pour into commodity hardware running Linux. And I must say that the resulting wine was... well... fascinating.
Vertica has been quietly selling product for three quarters and has about 50 customers. Their pricing is solely based on data volume, rather than the number and size of processors. Current partnerships include Business Objects, JasperSoft, Informatica, Talend, and interestingly Hewlett-Packard.
Vertica is a company to watch and expect a launch of a second version sometime next year.
Sometimes you start reading a book with low expectations about its significance. But, the book surprises you and delivers a message of great significance. That has happened with a new book entitled The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He is a professor of the Sciences of Uncertainty (an odd title) at the University of Massachusetts. See his Wikipedia entry and a PBS podcast.
Let me start with the bottom line. I strongly recommend this book for all professionals in Business Intelligence (BI) who care about the means and results of our profession upon our clients.
I have this naïve belief that more information is better, assuming that the information is relevant to the business, properly cleansed, structured cross-functional, analyze appropriately, distributed to the right people and so on. This book totally negated that belief, instilling a humble attitude toward how much we can not know and shocking me about how much our current BI practices do damage to our clients.
And... I have just read the first few chapters. I am starting to be aware of the problems in general, confused about their implications to BI, and wondering whether there are any solutions. This is a book that will take several months to consume (because you read a few sentences, think ‘what?’ and then reread it several more times).
Let me give a small taste of Taleb’s argument. Before Australia was discovered, everyone knew that all swans were white, because all swans that were ever observed were white. Therefore, rule of nature was that all swans are white. Someone discovered a black swan in Australia. That one swan negated a belief held for a thousand years by all of mankind. Afterward, people concocted explanations as to why such a rare animal was perfectly normal and should have been expected. Taleb then extends this analogy to explain the events and aftermath of September 11, along with many other pivotal events in human history.
That is the Black Swan. It is a totally unexpected, but significant, rare event that seems plausible...afterwards. In Taleb’s words, the Black Swan is an event with three attributes: “First, it is an outlier as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact [changing our basic paradigms that explain the world]. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”
I submit that we are unprepared to handle the Black Swan with current BI technology and practices. In fact, current BI does more harm than good, by giving us a false sense of reliability in what we think we know.
Help me with my struggle to understand the practical importance of the Black Swan. I would like to get a discussion established on Black Swan issues within the BI profession, along with joint publications with some of you. Is there anyone interested in this pilgrimage?
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