Tightly-coupled systems

Loosely-coupled systems is a concept in which I am interested. I recently read a good counter example of a tightly-coupled system that I want to remember for illustrative means. The scheduling of airline flights. Some quotes:

"In a less efficient era, the waste of simple back-and-forth scheduling might have meant an extra aircraft or two just waiting idly, costing the airline money, but luckily available to fill in for the out-of-service DC-10. Now, with scheduling approachign perfection, less than 2 percent of American's fleet lies fallow at any given moment. So the nearest replacement plane happens to be in Dallas. A crew must fly it to Chicago."

"The paradox of efficiency means taht as the web tightens it grows more vulnerable to small disturbances -- disruptions and delays that can cascade through the system for days."

"Networks like this are said to be tightly coupled. A complex construction project with a timeline scheduled with perfect efficiency, all the slack squeezed out of it, may be tightly coupled and a candidate for serious disruption."

"Charles Perrow, in his study Normal accidents, extended the concept to complex systems where the coupling connects not physical parts but abstract services, people, and organizations. 'Looselyl coupled systems, whether for good or ill, can incorporate shocks and failures and pressures for change without destabilization,' he notes. 'Tightly coupled systems will respond more quickly to these perturbations, but the response may be disastrous.'

Gleick, James. Faster: the acceleration of just about everything. Pantheon Books, New York, 1999, pp. 219, 223, 224.

Quote about technology to socialize

"Net Geners use technology extensively to network and socialize. In their personal lives, buddy lists, virtual communities, and social networks such as Flickr or Orkut are heavily used. 'When we poll users about what they actually do with their computers, some form of social interaction always tops the list -- conversation, collaboration, playing games, and so on. The practice of software design is shot through with computers-as-box assumptions, while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the device as an entrance to a social space.'"

Quote from page 2.12 of Chapter 2 (titled Is it age of IT: first steps toward understanding the Net Generation) of Educating the Net Generation by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger (editors), 2005 EDUCAUSE (ISBN: 0-9672853-2-1).

I've been blogged (RSS in catalog idea)

I've been blogged at the RSS4Lib blog. Read a few more details about my experiment with using RSS, ColdFusion, Javascript, and the Feed2RSS hosted script to put the tables of contents of journals live, on-the-fly, into our library's catalog.

Read at: http://blogs.fletcher.tufts.edu/rss4lib/archives/000812.html

Hack quote

Walking through our tech processing office today, I noticed the book Hacking RSS and Atom (ISBN 0764597582). I put a note on it to have it routed to me after being cataloged. While perusing it, I noticed a great quote on the back:

This book is not about the minutia of RSS and Atom programming. It's about doing cool stuff with syndication feeds -- making the technology give you exactly what you want the way you want. [snip] Tantalizing loose ends beg you to create more hacks the author hasn't thought up yet. Because if you can't have fun with the technology, what's the point?

 

There's a great lesson there.

Tim O'Reilly's article on Web 2.0

I read a great article by Tim O'Reilly on the Web 2.0 concept. Read at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

He really brings together a lot of great ideas that are percolating out there. Read it! I highly recommend it.

I broke my finger playing soccer on Sun, Sep 11, 2005.



(I'm a goalkeeper, and, yes!, I made the save and played the rest of the game.)

They had to put two screws in to hold the bone together.

First timer

Alright, this is my first post. I figured if I read about, talk about, think about new technology stuff like blogs, I'd better at least set one up for myself.

I do have other ways to get my thoughts or innovations out there to other interested parties, so it's not essential for me to have one. But, let me experience the technology and the environment. And, perhaps give myself a test bed to try some experiments.