Month: January 2008

Black people in science and innovation

It’s been a few times already that I heard the argument that “black people made no contribution to computer science“.  I’ve also heard a few alternative versions, which were less or more specific, varying from “African blacks” and “no innovations“, to “black women” and “no contribution to science“.

Depending on the overall direction of the discussion, variation of the argument, and sensibility of the opponent, it can be very easy or rather impossible to reason. For example, an argument like “there is not one black programmer in the world” is pretty trivial to destroy.  There are at least a few respectable Perl Monks of the black race.  Over the last few years, I personally have been in contact (IM, email, phone) with a few black programmers and system administrators.  On the other hand, a request for a name or a biography of a black computer scientist might be much harder.  I am not very good with names and biographies, and I don’t know many scientist by name at all.  Picking representatives of a certain race using my own memory is close to impossible.

So, I asked The Mighty Google for a few names and biographies, and it replied.  Here are a few links that I picked from the results:

I have to admit that I was a little bit surprised by the low number of results.  Finding the above weren’t very easy.  Also, many links were very outdated.  Sometimes I’d come across a quote that slowed me down before I could “sink it in”.  Here are a couple of such examples:

one quarter of one percent (.25%) of computer scientists are black

from the “Computer Scientists of the African Diaspora” page, which seems to be from the 1990s.

Throughout the United States, there are only 32 African-American computer science (CS) professors.

from the “A Model for Department Diversity” article, which was posted in 2004.

I think that the above references are enough to convince any sane person that both science and innovation have benefited from black people.  Whether the benefits were to the same degree as those of the other races is a totally different question.  I am not going to debate it now, but perhaps I will come back to it later.

(NOTE TO MYSELF for when and if I do: consider that most computer science innovation is happening in the USA [obviuos, but citation needed], and that black people make only about 12% of the USA population [Wikipedia]. )

On Microsoft and Linux

Remember the other time I was agreeing with Matt Mullenweg’s prediction of Microsoft opening sources of Windows by 2017?  Remeber I wrote a list of bullets with my reasons?  Remember the first one being:

Neither Microsoft in general, no Bill Gates are stupid.  They are very much profit oriented. Whatever makes them more money, they’ll go for it.

Well, here is another piece of news that confirms that.

Quote #1:

Novell was paid a whopping $355.6 million by Microsoft in return for software licensing

Quote #2:

Microsoft purchasing 70,000 licences for Novell’s SuSE Linux enterprise server, which accounts for much of what Microsoft was paying for. Microsoft, in turn, then sells these on to its customers.

Quote #3:

“This is to bridge the divide between open source and proprietary source software,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the time, in what amounted to an abrupt about-face on his part given his previous criticism of Linux. “It gives customers greater flexibility in ways they have certainly been demanding.”

On open source and innovation

OK, open source innovation might be chaotic because it lacks direction. There’s no PR-department at ‘the Linux community office’ to ask what the current innovations are, what’s going on and what’s new. Instead of being lazy you have to find it out for yourself. Even someone who spends a part of the day reading news stories about open source software, finds at least ten innovative new programs he has never heard of in a list of 100 recommended open source programs (that’s what happened to me today). No, I’m afraid people who think open source doesn’t bring innovation and don’t see how the closed source model hinders innovation just failed their trendwatcher exam. Wake up, it’s 2008!

Here is an excellent post on how open source helps the innovation.

Elvis, Beatles, Nirvana, then who?

Matthew Sidney Long brings up an interesting point with a challange:

Please name me a band over the past 10 years who has come close to Nirvana in sheer impact and talent since Kurt put shotgun to mouth above garage in 1994? (and, I’m not talking about some indie band that hardly anyone listens to or some ring-tone fueled, Top-40 creation who no one will remember in 6 months. I’m talking IMPACT here, people. Combining art AND commerce. Both big AND authentic. Dig?).

My pick would be Rammstein, of course.  That’s the band that made an impact.  I don’t know if it was as strong as Nirvana’s or not, but I think it was pretty close.  As always, I very biased and subjective.

While I was trying to come up with the band, I had a thought about the strength of an impact.  And, as much as I love Nirvana, I have to admit that it was nowhere near the scale of Elvis and Beatles.  There were a few others in between that were larger than Nirvana too.

If Rammstein isn’t as big of an impact as Nirvana, maybe it has to something to do with my theory of sources.  Back in the days of Elvis and Beatles, there were much less sourcse of music available to an average listener, than it was in the days of Nirvana.  Think number of albums, songs, bands, radio stations, television, top-X lists and hit parades, music awards, DJs, Internet, peer-to-peer, mp3s, music shops, etc.  So, each band had a chance of producing a bigger impact back then.  In the last 14 years, since Nirvana, the number of sources only grew.  So, each band these days has even less of a chance to impact the world.

Either that, or the music industry is broken.  Or both.

Blog 365 initiative

Via Web Worker Daily I learned about Blog 365.  That’s a nice idea which I heard and did before, and which I think is still valuable enough to bring attention to.

More and more people are joining the blogosphere every day.  More and more people ask the same questions over and over – “how can I improve my blogging?”, “how can I get more comments?”, “how can I promote my blog more?”, etc.  To all of them I answer – Blog 365.

You see, the hardest part of blogging is … actually, blogging – thinking about things, finding things, preparing content, and posting it.  You can have all bells and features on your blog, and it can be search engine optimized to no avail, but if you don’t publish any posts, nothing will matter.  Most blogs get lost and disappear because they don’t get updated anymore.

Now, if you are new to blogging, then posting every day may sound like a hard job to do.  I’ll tell you a little secret – it is, but for just a few weeks. The thing here is to make blogging into a routine.  Once your brain understands that it has to produce at least one post every day, it will start looking for and creating content by itself.  You won’t have to do anything, but pick the bits that you like better and write them down.

I did a “have to publish at least one post every day” experiment a few times myself.  The longest one was, I think, in 2004 and ran for about a year and a half.  My posts varied from thoughts, notes, and simple links to somebody else’s pictures and videos.  Eventually, I got it into my system.  I had no problems posting something every day.  Even better than that.  There was a period of time when I felt uncomfortable if I didn’t publish anything.

Sure, I did my share of polluting the web with crap that nobody cares about.  But that was all for the better.  Here are the benefits from the top of my head:

  • my English got better.  Much better.
  • my touch-typing  got better. Much better.
  • my Google skills got better. Much better.
  • my reasoning got better. I learned that if I say something, I might be asked for a reference, so I learned to check those references before I was saying anything.
  • my blog got more popular (more incoming links, more and better search engine results positioning, more people coming in and staying, more comments)
  • my understanding of many social (people, communications, other cultures) and technical (Internet, blogging tools, search engines) topics improved a lot.
  • I found a few more friends (not as in “close friends”, but as in “people with who I enjoy talking a lot”) that I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

These are just a few.  There are many more.  Like all those archives that I can search through and cross reference now…

So, if you are interesting in blogging, the Internet, or communications, take my advice – join the Blog 365 project.  It’s much easier to do this with several other people, than alone.  They understand what you are going through and how tough it is during the first few weeks.  They’ll help you out with ideas, tips, links, and comments.  You’ll get more out of it than you can imagine.  We all will. Just give it a try.

Blogging is a skill.  It’s like tough-typing, programming, riding a bicycle, or driving – you can read all about it you want, but you won’t get any better until you’ll sit down and start blogging.  A lot.  So, here is your chance.  Take it!