It’s spring training time in sunny Florida, as well as other areas of the country with mild weather and baseball. For those of you new to the allusion, it comes from a poem by Franklin Pierce Adams and is also known as “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”. Tinker, Evers, and Chance were the double play combination of the 1910 Chicago Cubs (shortstop, second base, and first base). Because of their effectiveness on the field these Cubs players were worthy opponents of the old New York Giants, for whom Adams was a fan, and who were the kings of baseball during most of the first fifth of a century of the modern era (1901-1922). That is, until they were suddenly overtaken by their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, who came to dominate baseball for the next 40 years, beginning with the arrival of Babe Ruth.
(more…)Computer Science
I Can’t Drive 55 — The New York Times and Moore’s Law
Yesterday the New York Times published an article about Moore’s Law. While interesting in that John Markoff, who is the Times science writer, speculates that in about 5 years the computing industry will be “manipulating material as small as atoms” and therefore may hit a wall in what has become a back of the envelope calculation of the multiplicative nature of computing complexity and power in the silicon age.
This article prompted a follow on from Brian Feldman at NY Mag, that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has anticipated a broader definition of the phenomenon of the accelerating rate of computing power to take into account quantum computing. Note here that the definition used in this context is the literal one: the doubling of the number of transistors over time that can be placed on a microchip. That is a correct summation of what Gordon Moore said, but it not how Moore’s Law is viewed or applied within the tech industry.
(more…)Don’t Know Much…–Knowledge Discovery in Data
A short while ago I found myself in an odd venue where a question was posed about my being an educated individual, as if it were an accusation. Yes, I replied, but then, after giving it some thought, I made some qualifications to my response. Educated regarding what?
It seems that, despite a little more than a century of public education and widespread advanced education having been adopted in the United States, along with the resulting advent of widespread literacy, that we haven’t entirely come to grips with what it means. For the question of being an “educated person” has its roots in an outmoded concept–an artifact of the 18th and 19th century–where education was delineated, and availability determined, by class and profession. Perhaps this is the basis for the large strain of anti-intellectualism and science denial in the society at large.
(more…)Three’s a Crowd — The Nash Equilibrium, Computer Science, and Economics (and what it means for Project Management theory)
Over the last couple of weeks reading picked up on an interesting article via Brad DeLong’s blog, who picked it up from Larry Hardesty at MIT News. First a little background devoted to defining terms. The Nash Equilibrium is a part of Game Theory in measuring how and why people make choices in social networks. As defined in this Columbia University paper:
A game (in strategic or normal form) consists of the following three elements: a set of players, a set of actions (or pure-strategies) available to each player, and a payoff (or utility) function for each player. The payoff functions represent each player’s preferences over action profiles, where an action profile is simply a list of actions, one for each player. A pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is an action profile with the property that no single player can obtain a higher payoff by deviating unilaterally from this profile.
(more…)
Life, Project Management, and Everything 