The year of the astronomy

2009 not only is the year of Charles Darwin ( read more about this also here in “The bamboo raft” ), it is also the Year of the Astronomy, as has been decided by the UN and the International Astronomic Union (IAU) on December 20th, 2007.

Exactly 400 years ago Johannes Kepler published what he had discovered about the physics of the sky, the laws of planetary motion: "The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus." And: "A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time." (The third law has been added at a later time). Galileo Galilei, not the inventor of the telescope, was the first to use it – after making some improvements – to look at the sky. When he saw mountains, lowlands and the landscapes of the moon and when he observed the moons of Jupiter he discovered that planet earth is nothing special in the universe, just an orb like many others.

The knowledge those two gained was in total contradiction to what human mankind up to that time thought about the fundamentals of our world. Described more by philosophers like Aristotle and Ptolemy and strongly supported by religions and the Christian Church the picture of the world up to this time was a “geo-centric” one, describing planet Earth as the one and only centre of the universe. Some say that this gain of knowledge initiated by Kepler and Galileo has been the most dramatic one in the history of human mankind, it definitely was part of the Scientific Revolution, as well as Charles Darwin’s discoveries.

Geo-centric picture of the world according to Tycho Brahe.
Source: wikipedia.

You must imagine this time when only a few people knew what Kepler and Galileo knew at that moment. What they had discovered was not just a little improvement of our knowledge about the world, it was a revolutionary change in total conflict with traditional knowledge, an attack against religions and church.  People probably were not that open minded anyway these days but under these circumstances people like Kepler and Galileo had to make a tough decision whether they wanted to practice what we would call knowledge sharing nowadays. It probably was not really an option for them to hold back their knowledge, but with that they started a fight against those forces who claimed to know everything about our world at that time. Sharing knowledge in these times could easily have a major negative impact on those attempting this. Galileo actually found himself in front of the Inquisition where he had to argue about his findings and  finally confess that he was wrong. especially also in regards to his support of what Kepler had published.. At the end he has been found suspect of heresy and has been put under house arrest for the rest of his life. It took the church until 1992 to come up with an excuse how the Galileo affair had been handled and to admit that our planet is not stationary.

Knowledge sharing in these days is much easier, isn’t it ? At least for us as we live in an open and democratic world – which is still not the case everywhere on this planet. Nevertheless, who of us would ever be in the position to discover something as spectacular as Kepler and Galileo did ? Sharing knowledge about information technology or project management, discussing things like social software or SOA is by far less dramatic compared to those topics “discussed” 400 years ago. But still we have big discoveries to make: finding the theory of everything, explaining what happened during the first sub seconds after the big bang or even before it,  finding ways to produce the amount of energy we need without killing us and our planet, findings cures against our major diseases.

Source: bild der wissenschaft 2/2009 (article “Die Astro-Revoluzzer”) and wikipedia

Image searching

We are pretty used to search the net by typing in some search terms and obtaining sooner or later the information we are looking for. We know how to narrow down a search by using a “+” prefix or the keyword “AND” ( depending on what search engine one is using ), we can search by tags and we use convenient firefox search tools to search particular sites. We know where to always get an answer ( Wikipedia ) and we know that if Wikipedia would not exist we would be pretty much lost without google.

"DSC01227" by whorus3.

What you probably don’t know yet is that it is also possible to start a search with a given image. TinEye is the service I am talking about, it has been mentioned in Lifehacker a few month ago. And even you might know this you might have asked yourself the question what this could be good for.

Let me give you an example. Last week I featured this photo on the right as my favorite flickr photo of the week published under a CC license in my company internal blog. Like many photos in flickr it did not come with any meaningful title or description what it shows, but I was curious to learn more about this particular gate and where it is located.

TinEye helped me to find out. I pasted in the URL to this photo and retrieved this list of search results. I was truly surprised to find indeed a lot of similar images of the very same place. After following a few of the links and ending up on some pages useless for me because they only contained that image without any further information or they were written in some foreign language I finally ended up here and learned that this is a “Famous floating torii gate”. Now I had found the right term to look up more details in Wikipedia:

A torii (鳥居^?) (IPA: /ˈtɔriˌi/) is a traditional Japanese gate commonly found at the entry to a Shinto shrine, although it can be found at Buddhist temples as well.

The particular gate on this photo is located at the …

Itsukushima Shrine (Japanese: 厳島神社, Itsukushima Jinja) is a Shinto shrine on the island of Itsukushima (popularly known as Miyajima) in the city of Hatsukaichi in Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan.

I think this is an impressive example and case study how image searching can be of any use.

Tineyes search index currently still is pretty small. If I search for a particular place where I have been during my trip to Norway in 2004 I find nothing. Searching for a more popular spot in San Francisco at least retrieves 2 search results. A search for the famous Golden Gate Bridge using this photo fails, but when I use this photo from wikipedia I get several findings: multiple usages of obviously the very same photo at different places, a creative manipulation of that photo and also similar shots. One purpose of Tineyes of course is to find out who has stolen one of your photos e.g. from flickr to use it somewhere else. For example this portrait of Galileo Galilei also used in Wikipedia has been used at 47 different other locations in the internet.

Phone terror

Since I am working most of my time from home I realize how many spam phone calls we are getting. Well, not that many, but I guess almost one per day. Most of them actually start with a computer talking to me.
“Congratulations. You have won …”
Latest at that point I have hung up already.
Or the call starts: “You have ended up in our waiting queue …”. Come on, how silly is that ? Some stupid machine calls me to tell me I am in a waiting loop ? I didn’t call, they called me !

They are getting smarter meanwhile.
“Hello, my name is Barbara Mayer …”. I already hung up because I realized it is still a computer voice and by adding some name to what the machine tries to tell me the message does not really get personal nor important.

Today during my lunch break there was another phone call. This time a real lady from one company who call quiet often to contact my wife. It’s always a different lady of course – but the same company. Its actually the company which once tried to sell me an internet connection without ever delivering anything. They simply waste my time !

“Can I talk to Alexandra Magard, please ?”
I right away started ( and was surprised about how aggressive I was getting ): “I told you a hundred times already that my wife is not at home at this time.”
“Can you talk to me in a normal way ?”, she replied. “I am talking to you the first time.”
“That might be true”, I said. “And it’s not your personal fault, but I told your company already a hundred times that my wife is not at home weekdays during noon time. Please simply pass it on.”
“OK, I will”. End of phone call.

I started wondering why I have been so aggressive.  It is actually no wonder taking into account all these time wasting spam and sales phone calls I am getting.

I also noticed that obviously this company does not manage to acquire, store and  share with all its selling people this little piece of information: the time frame during which they can not reach my wife at home. This is a little example how a little failure in proper knowledge management can make a customer unhappy. ( Well, I am not really their customer, my wife is, but I think you get the point ).

Tags and Folders

Last week I was sitting in a phone interview by someone who runs a study about social software and especially tagging. One purpose of the interview was to find out how I am tagging information within IBM’s social software offerings but also in external social software I am using like flickr or del.icio.us ( in this interview I learned how to pronounce this correctly and where actually this strange URL comes from: delicious, not d-e-l-dot-i-c-i-o-dot-u-s ; hasn’t been obvious to me until now since English is not my mother language).
During that interview I suddenly heard me saying that tags and folders are pretty much the same.

Hummmh, is that really true ? Let’s try to sort this out.

First of all we all might agree that both are means to somehow arrange pieces of information ( usually called documents, can be articles, photos, videos, emails, bookmarks or whatever ).

A folder is actually an old term and has an equivalent in the physical world. Remember those paper or plastic folder where you can put in some paper sheets ? Now, those folder would have one special characteristic – at least those folder in physical world: you can put one sheet of paper only into one folder. This actually requires you to think carefully about how to name your folders. Assume you have folders for your paper mail you still receive once in a while and you name your folder after companies you receive mails from, but you have also a folder for “assurance” policies. What if you receive an assurance policie from company xzy ? Do you put that into your “xyz” folder or do you put it into the “assurance policy” folder ? Or do you may be create a copy of that document to satisfy both folders ?

Tags actually also have a physical world equivalent: a little label you can attach to a document for instance using a clip or some strap. Thus in case of the assurance policy: why not adding two tags, one labeled “xyz”, the second one labeled “assurance policy”. No problem with that, right ? You could even use different colors for those different tags.

Now assume you tag all your letters you receive like this and throw them on a big stack since because you use tags you do not need folders anymore. You would very soon end up with a huge pile of letters, right ? And do you think it would be easy for you to find anything in this pile of papers ? Even if you use colored tags – once you reach a critical mass like let’s say 1000 sheets of paper it would become hard to find a particular one, right ?

Thus it looks like tags are not a really practical approach in our physical world. We prefer to use folder, most probably even with some alphabetic or otherwise organized index within that folder, since even finding something within a folder once you hold the right folder in your hands still is a little challenge.

Once we deal with “soft-papers”, or let’s say software documents or files, it becomes easier to search. The computer and some piece of software can do that for us very quickly without doing mistakes and overlooking something. Thus tags might become the preferred means to arrange documents due to their advantage that I can use multiple tags for one document.

Now in software world – is it really true that the difference between tags and folders actually is that documents have a one-to-one relationship to folders and a one-to-many relationship to tags ?

It is probably not that easy, since a folder in software world might not be always modeled 100% equivalent to a folder in physical world.

Let us look at folder in computer file systems. Under Windows it might be true that a file can exist in one folder only. Of course we can create a shortcut to a file and move that to another folder, but still the file would be in one folder and that pointer to the file in a second folder. Under Linux this might be pretty much the same but look different. Through the concept of logical links ( I am not really a file systems expert, thus those experts out there: feel free to comment. Is a shortcut under Windows equivalent to a logic link under linux ? ) it might at least look like that a file exists in multiple folder.

Let us look at Lotus Notes: usually I move a document from one folder to another one, thus it always exists in one folder unless I do not create a copy. This is the standard behavior, but I also can “Add” a document to another folder – then one and the same document will show up in multiple folders and whatever I do to one ( including deleting it ) in one folder will become visible in the other folders as well – since this is really one and the same document.

In addition to folder Lotus Notes has the concept of views – one document might appear in multiple views. If I delete it from one view it is gone in all other views as well.

Did this blog article help to figure out the difference between tags vs. folder and what they have in common ? Probably not 100%, but to some extent I hope. Let’s take those two messages out of it:

• Both tags and folder are a means to arrange information.
• Typically a document exists in one folder but can have multiple tags.

The confusion about folder and tags is real, that much is sure when I look for instance at the latest move by google to come up with a new frontend for their “Google Docs & Spreadsheets” offering. They bascially have replaced tags with folders because obviously user have been asking for this according to this google blog article: “An entirely new way to stay organized“.

Almost from the day we launched people have been clamoring for folders. They’re here! Even cooler, our new folders continue to work like the tags they’ve replaced – your old tags are automatically converted to folders and documents can live in more than one folder at a time.

Documents can live in more than one folder ? This is against what I have said above about folders, at least about folders in physical world. Either they have done a bad job to model folders in their world or they just decided to name tags “folders” because user more like this traditional concept of good old-fashioned folders.

Some readers of my company blog actually pointed out two more significant differences between folders and tags in their comments:

•   With folders you can realize a hierarchy. You can build a “tree” type order by putting folders into folders. Tags usually can not be tagged.
• Folders can be emptied and you could end up with empty folders. In case of tags – if you do not have any document with that tag then this tag basically is gone.

“Britannica and I”

“Britannica & ich” is the book I am currently reading. Original title: The “Know-It-All“. It is about A. J. Jacobs who tries to become the smartest man on world and starts reading the entire Britannica: 33.000 pages, 65.000 articles , 24.000 illustrations, 32 books with a weight of 2 kilogramm per book, 44 million words.
This endeavour takes him 15 month of his life. He forces himself to read everything whether he is interested in or not and to stay in the strict alphabetic sequence the Britannica is organized after.
While he also tries to memorize everything he soon realizes that even with this immense knowledge ( called intelligence in this German translation of the book; I actually don’t agree that much knowledge and intelligence are the same thing ) he fails in

• winning a crossword competition because he did not focus on learning place names with only 2 letters or nouns with four letters and many vowels. And because of the irritating cough of the woman sitting next to him.
• being chosen for “Who wants to be a millionaire” since he simply fails the casting procedure for this TV show, may be because he might have the wrong face. ( May be he still will make it, I am just at letter “S” in the book )
• inflating an air mattress when friends come to visit his place

And his wife starts calling herself a “encyclopedia widow”.
The book is written in a very humorous way, but discusses also some of the articles he is going through in Britannica, thus the reader learns a small subset of what A. J. Jacobs is learning and starts feeling smart as well.

Let’s see: Wikipedia has 1.841.762 articles today ( in English language, only 600.075 in German language ). Being optimistic and assuming I would life 40 more years I would have to read 126 articles per day. According to the alphabetic index of Wikipedia I actually would have to start with an article about the number “0” ( wow, this is a long article already !), followed by an article about the national emergency number in Australia ( this article is not so long ). Since Wikipedia also deals with acronyms under “Aa” I would have to start with an article about Argentina’s largest airline (Aerolíneas Argentinas, quiet comprehensive article ), followed by an article about the largest airline in the world in terms of passenger-miles transported ( American Airlines ; a very comprehensive article), followed by Air America, an airline operated by the CIA, followed by the first non-airline article about an American railroad (Ann Arbor Railroad ). It would continue like this until “Aaron Fox“, the last entry under “Aa” about a music professor and guitarist ( this one is real short, only some seconds needed to read it ), would continue with “Ab” (Ab is a Dutch name, but does not have an extra article; first article here is about a steam locomotive class built for New Zealand ), to “AZ Village” ( actually Arizona Village in Arizona ), the last entry under “Az”, now followed by “A ” entries like “A & C Black“, a British book publishing company, to “Bank of America (BA)”, first article under “B”, and so on, until I would reach “zZz“, a Dutch band from Amsterdam, which is not really the last one. It is followed by “Z“, the atomic number, also known as the number of protons found in the nucleus of an atom, followed by some more articles starting with “Z “, until I finally would reach “Zadruga” ( a type of rural community historically common among South Slavics people ) and hopefully still would be alive ( without really understanding why “Zadruga” comes after “zZz” ).

Anyhow, this endeavour would have to work against a moving target. How many articles will be there in Wikipedia in the year 2047 ? And how would I keep track on what has been added after I went through a particular letter ?

I guess I better keep my fingers away from this adventure and better focus on playing squash as long as I can and may be golf a little later.