In “We Just Build Hammers”, Coraline Ada Ehmke explores historic parallels to moral issues in technology & software development. Referencing both fiction, historic and scientific sources, the book moves in four parts towards the current day and age.

I start of with a summary of the book, followed by a short reflection.

Summary

In the first part H.G. Wells’ writings set the scene. Wells’ has an almost scientific approach to his writing. Ehmke writes:

Wells’s future histories shined a light on what was possible and gave people permission to imagine alternate futures. But he insisted on the need for rational approaches for bringing these futures about or averting their catastrophe.”

His literature is compared to events that were developing in that same era. Leo Szilard is quoted saying:

In so far as the present discoveries in physics are concerned, the forecast of the writers may prove to be more a…

In archives it helps to have PIDs: Persistent IDentifiers. PIDs help organisations attribute data to consistently identified objects. There are many PID-schemes. Books can be persistently identified by their ISBN. In science, DOIs are popular to identify scientific articles. And there are plenty of other persistent identifiers.

What most of them share is the following: they need registration. And while that could be a good thing, I’ve seen well meant attempts at creating a PID where the central entity went rogue, links are dependent on some centralised resolver and it all falls apart.

The requirements

When I was tasked to create a long lasting QR label the requirements were clear:

• The basis had to be a URL (QR Codes can contain anything, but URLs deliver the best UX)
• It should have a fallback: the URL should not be a meaningless string; it should at least contain an identifier it was once assigned; in the …

In his blog, Jure Cuhalev, poses the question: "What do you think about linking? Would you agree to get payed and valued based on number of incoming links to your personal blog?"

Well, first of all, my technorati rating is low... I'm not active in the blogosphere and all that... so personally I'd rather not like to get paid based on my incoming links ;), but that's besides the point.... his basic idea is interesting: incoming links may tell us something about our authorativeness.

I don't think so...

I don't believe that incoming links tell us something about our authorativeness. Let me start with an counter example that dismays, imho, this idea: Paris Hilton. I just linked to her. Does this mean I think she is an authority? No, personally I'd rather  conside...

In Dutch, there is a small joke that people tell to children: “ork ork ork, soep eetje met een…” (which translates to: “ork ork ork, you eat soup using a…” Most children will initially say ‘vork’ (‘fork’), but of course the right answer is ‘lepel’ (‘spoon’)… and while most children know this, most answer incorrectly. The example above is a typical example of how order of presentation can influence an answer in a questionnaire.

Not so long ago I was phoned by a representative of the Dutch bureau of statistics, CBS. It was an interview about the volunteer work and my willingness to do more. After about 6 or 8 questions, like “Do you volunteer in work for a sports society?”, “Do you volunteer in work for elderly? “ … etc., a question was asked whether I’d like to do more volunteer work. Well, hell yes! I was feeling guilty after having answered so many times ‘no’ to ‘little’ to each of the questions she was asking. Yes, I …