Dear Doug,60 years ago you set the agenda to increase the collective ability to deal with urgent complex problems. And you succeeded in in every possible respect! Now it is up to mankind, that is all of us(!), to use and improve the collaborative tools in a way to solve today’s global problems. Thank you for trailblazing the first steps. Lots of health and joy to you!
sincerely
Matthias Müller-Prove, Hamburg, Germany
More greetings…
Tag: medichi
MEDICHI – IEEE Annals (3)2008
I realized that the special issue of the IEEE Annals on “Methods and Challenges in the History of Informatics” has been published.
The editorial and Mike Mahoney’s article are available at www.computer.org/portal/site/annals/Well done.
Joe Weizenbaum in Klagenfurt, 2007
Joseph Weizenbaum at MEDICHI 2007
Klagenfurt Campus TV recorded the keynote from Mike Mahoney What Makes the History of Software Hard and Why it Matters, the read-out talk for Niklaus Wirth A Brief History of Software Engineering, Tibor Vamos’ presentation Nothing is More Practical than a Good Theory, and Joseph Weizenbaum‘s closing keynote Social and political impact of the long term history of computing at MEDICHI 2007.
Find more videos at mprove: webcasts.
PS: Happy birthday Joe, to your 85th birthday today!
human reason
According to Joe Weizenbaum, the single most important paragraph of his book Computer Power and Human Reason is the following on page 276:
It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.
I met Joe at MEDICHI in Klagenfurt last year. A great moment where he touched me.
Dueling Interaction Models of Personal-Computing and Web-Computing
A position paper for MEDICHI 2007 by Matthias Müller-Prove and Frank Ludolph:
Abstract. Today the user of PCs is facing several inconsistencies which originate from an unresolved situation between two competing interaction models. The WIMP-desktop model has been developed nearly 30 years ago at Xerox Parc and Apple Computer. The web model became popular in the mid 1990s and has profoundly changed business and the perception of social relationships. Contradictions between both models have a severe negative impact on the human-computer interaction.
Read the entire article.