Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Feeling Chad's pain. In his column this week, Chad Dickerson fesses up to the dirty secret of XML content management. The blurb reads: "XML isn't a panacea, especially if the semantic integrity of data hasn't been maintained properly." No one intended for our XML data to grow unwieldy over the past few years, but it did. It takes a lot of hard work and attention to maintain the semantic integrity of the data represented in your XML, as your business morphs and changes and new people come along to touch and manipulate the data in different ways. It's particularly difficult when you're converting data created by people, ensconced in the daily ebb and flow of messy human life, into a machine-readable format intended for the ages ... [Jon's Radio] 2:38:01 PM     Technology Review: Creating a Culture of Ideas. Nicholas Negroponte. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people's walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. Our biggest challenge in stimulating a creative culture is finding ways to encourage multiple points of views. Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. This is simply because perspective is more important than IQ. The irony is that perspective will not get kids into college, nor does it help them thrive there. Academia rewards depth. Expertise is bred by experts who work with their own kind. Departments and labs focus on fields and subfields, now and then adding or subtracting a domain. Graduate degrees, not to mention tenure, depend upon tunneling into truths and illuminating ideas in narrow areas. [Tomalak's Realm] 12:28:36 PM

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