the trip report of e.w. dijkstra gives a little bit of an inside about the "twoness" of europea :: usa || programmers :: computer scientists.

Trip Report IBM Seminar about "Communication and Computers'', Newcastle, Sept. 1973: There are two completely different views of programming. On the one hand we have the (academic) study about the nature of the intellectual challenge, on the other hand we have programming as it is done and can be done by the hundreds of thousands that are called "programmers" today. These are two completely different subjects, and when two groups are talking about them as if it were one subject, unaware of the "twoness", endless confusions arise ...

... the giant IBM forcing a de facto standard upon the world of computing, "ma Bell" forcing in a very similar fashion a de facto standard upon the world of communication and finally as a third (politically very powerful) party the ARPA network, an achievement that, in spite of all its patent shortcomings, will be a model for many future efforts, if only because it has been such an expensive experiment ...

As far as his [sandy fraser, bell labs] technical message was concerned, he was also very careful --alarmingly careful, one might say-- : he made the impression of arguing that all technical considerations pointed in a direction opposite to the store-and-forward techniques chosen for the ARPA network, but clearly he wished to avoid making all ARPA fans his declared enemies ...

There were two talks from PTT officials, a management talk by Mr. G. Dale from the English PTT and a technical one by ir.A. Boesveld of the Dutch PTT. The first speaker dealt with international politics, the second one described Stored Program Controlled Telephone Exchanges.

After both talks the audience misbehaved, at least to my standards; the audience started to attack the (his) PTT for monopolistic attitudes, misuse of power, failing public relations etc. I understand that it can be quite frustrating to get PTT's permission to hook an unusual gadget to their lines, but this seminar was the proper place or moment to air(?) those frustrations.

Mr. R. Scantlebury from the NPL, Teddington, described the m again experimental!-- NPL Data Communication Network. The subject, I gather, was appropriate. It was, however, a little bit too obvious that the speaker had done so before; it was a nice, polished presentation, but the speaker could not get excited about his subject, nor could his audience. I always like to listen to him lecturing, but that is because I like his English. | djikstra archive

would like to read more about the talk of g. dale, though.

also of interest: "on the fact that the atlantic ocean has two sides" | ewd611 - includes the suggestion: skip the first speaker as his appearance is due to sponsoring.

... He was amused by my innocence. Didn't I know that the first performer was a complete bogus speaker? Of course it was all humbug, everybody in the audience knew that! Puzzled I asked him why the man had been invited and why, at the end, some of the participants had even faked a discussion. "Oh, on occasions like that, we just go through the motions. IBM is one of the sponsors of this conference, so we had to accept an IBM speaker. He was given the first slot, because the sooner it is over, the better.". I was flabbergasted. Since then I have learned that this "going through the motions" is, indeed, a typical habit of the American scientific community. Whenever a large project is sponsored by a sufficiently prestigious or powerful body (MIT, ARPA, IBM, you name it), it is officially treated as sound and successful. The above story illustrates how utterly misleading that habit can be for an innocent European.

factspotter, by xerox grenoble. they wanna try to identify not just words but its context.

factbites is in place since 2005 and still out there, playing the encyclopedia game.

she taped her athena lecture, an award "that honors women who have made fundamental contributions to research" in foresight. it will be heard at the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval in amsterdam. (23-27 july 2007).

a short snipped of karen spärck about the semantic web, which she called a naive approach driven by computer scientists, who don't know what they are talking about. at least 2004, when i met her, she didn't believe that knowledge can be captured by ontologies; - and i expect, this lady and grande dame of the linguist society didn't change her opinion easily as she was a true source of knowledge.

universal character (audio/x-mpeg, 618 KB)

(i have to dig in my archives, as there was more ... things as the alpac report, alpac stands for "automatic language processing advisory committee", that killed research of the american linguist society on machine translation back in 1966, chomsky, the ancestor of systran and the like ...)

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