Sean McGrath

From Big Data to Long Data

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:11:00 +0000

My slides from my Ignite presentation.

ReinventLaw Silicon Valley 2013 from Sean McGrath

Memory lane...

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 00:54:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:12:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 17:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:09:00 +0000

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

Truly the end of an era

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:56:00 +0000

One of my favorite book types of all time - the humble dictionary - is an endangered species in print form. MacMillian is the latest publisher to bow to the inevitable. My soft spot for big, thick books - especially dictionaries - will grow as their production declines....I have arranged my world so that I look at my favorite paper dictionary every day. Its a 1926 Websters. They don't make 'em like that any more.

KLISS wins NASCIO eGovernment award

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:19:00 +0000

I am delighted to announce that KLISS has won the NASCIO 2012 State IT award under the eGovernment category. The full list is here: http://www.nascio.org/awards/2012awards/ The link to the KLISS introductory video (90 seconds) appears to be broken on the above page at the moment so use this one if you are interested in an overview of KLISS.

Yes, the law is a fractal

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:08:00 +0000

Andrew Stumpff on the law as a fractal. I particularly like the explanation of Mannings "Law of Conservation of Ambiguity". a profound insight....and then there is this: "But despite a lawyer’s hopes, the rule-writer cannot provide every answer in advance. That a regulation may fail to address all the questions practitioners might have is not a flaw in the regulation, or a mistake by the regulation-writer. It is a feature of reality; part of the fabric of the universe." A fabric of the universe indeed. See Larry Tesler's Law of the Conservation of Complexity in which my ITWorld article from a few years ago is quoted re business process complexity. There is a lot of conversation going on at the moment about how similar laws and source code are in may respects. Clay Shirky's recent TED Talk for example. This is all fine and valid but for me, the most powerful similarity is the correspondence between unit tests and caselaw as a means to deal with the specificity problem Andrew Stumpff writes about in this paper. Simply put, when a question arises about what is "correct" in software, we write a unit test to test a specific case. The unit test corpus gets bigger and bigger over time, serving as a regression test suit for future questions of correctness. In law, this is called precedent. Fundamentally the same thing.

Indiana Legislature

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 18:01:00 +0000

We have started work with the Indiana Legislature on yet another very exciting Legislative project.

From Microcomp to XML

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:58:00 +0000

Interesting reading about the GPOs move to an internal XML system. I have a soft spot for MicroComp. In particular the very fine typographic control if afforded over layout of tables and as I've said before, separating presentation and content is easier said than done. Especially in legal materials. All in all however, XML is obviously the way to go for an organization like GPO but there are a significant number of important subtleties related to legispruduce that they will need to be careful with. Especially when it comes to the amendatory cycle of bills.

Yup. Its complicated.

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:42:00 +0000

Sean Blanchfield on Software Complexity. Well worth a read.

Netbeans and NASCIO Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 20:30:00 +0000

Geertjan from Oracle on LWB's use of Netbeans in NASCIO award nominated LWB systems this year in Kansas and North Dakota.

Kansas IT Application Finalist in Open Government

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:15:00 +0000

Kansas IT Application Finalist in Open Government

Chuffed.

GIS In the Legislative Process

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:40:00 +0000

Forrester's Jennifer Belissent talks about GIS and references a subject I am passionate about. Namely, smart-maps as an aid to the legislative decision making processes in Parliaments/Legislatures.

NASCIO Award and Legislative Workbench (LWB)

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:32:00 +0000

NASCIO (National Association of State CIOs) has announced finalists for the 2012 awards and I'm delighted to say that two of the finalists are projects based on Propylon's LWB solution.

- The LEGEND System (North Dakota). Finalist under Cross Boundary Collaboration and Partnerships

- The KLISS System (Kansas). Finalist under Open Government.

Details about the awards are here: http://www.nascio.org/awards/2012awards/.

More information about LEGEND can be found here. More information about KLISS can be found here.

Unit tests are not echo chambers

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:05:00 +0000

Margaret Heffernan: Dare to disagree. Interesting stuff. Medical focus but I cannot help but relate it to the problem of producing good unit tests. Unit tests create a sort of constructive conflict with the corresponding application.

Most excellent new word of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:08:00 +0000

incrementalism

Tools of Change 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:51:00 +0000

I have never attended a Tools of Change event. Next year may be the year, for a variety of reasons. I really like going to conferences in NY. I don't get up there often enough to feed my inner Deli.

New Jython released

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:48:00 +0000

Jython 2.5.3 to be precise.

McGrath's 142857'th Law

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 22:02:00 +0000

The 142857th law states that the number of laws with the same overall shape as Moore's Law doubles every 18 months.

The myth of non-repudiation

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:58:00 +0000

Excellent piece by John Gregory on the very thorny non-repudiation question.

Give every fact a home page

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:44:00 +0000

Jon Udell says "lets give every fact its own home page on the web.

Absolutely. Numeric quantities, in particular, need this. The web needs to get a lot better at slinging numbers - not pages - and update events around the place.

Its starting to happen. Mostly, I think because of the emerging "web of things". Things like cosm and things like Personal Event Networks need "facts" to work with and a goodly number of said facts are numeric quantities.

Now it can coherently be argued that RDF makes numerical facts just drop out of its grander epistemological theory but I worry that RDF is seen as overkill for situations where it really is just a number you are looking for.

If the URI is http://facts.com/populations/ireland. All I want to do is to a HTTP GET and get back 4487000.

The simple case should be simple.

NCSL conference in Chicago, August 7-9

noreply@blogger.com (Sean McGrath) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 20:21:00 +0000

It is NCSL time of year again. Its hard to believe a year has gone by since the last annual NCSL event in San Antonio, Texas.

This year its Chicago. I hope its cooler than Texas was....Probably not.

We will be exhibiting @ booth 813, talking about eDemocracy, eLegislation, 21st century law-making, Legislative Transformation.

If you are going, please stop by and say hi.