Author Archives: admin

Sangha Population Visualization

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IBM’s research labs have a new data visualization service running, called “Many Eyes.” The idea is to put data sets into the public domain and then have many eyes look at them and to create insights through the group’s analysis. I think it’s a great idea and the tools are excellent — simple, powerful, and effective.

Sangha Population

To test Many Eyes out, I used a ‘data set’ I had lying around, a spreadsheet that I had put together of the population of Buddhist monks and nuns around the world. This monastic community, the sangha, is organized in the sense of having clear hierarchies and monastic rules, but it is not organized in any overall sense, so there isn’t a single source for this data. There is excellent, precise data on the number of Catholic monastics (which would be interesting to represent in Many Eyes), but Buddhist monastic population information is hard to come by.

So, years ago, I put together a plain spreadsheet with a row for each Buddhist region (I had Tibet as a separate region, for example, although Many Eyes didn’t acknowledge this) and columns for total country population, Buddhist population, monastic population, % Buddhist, % monastic, and a rating for my confidence in the data (low/medium/high). Now, overall, I’m not at all confident in the numbers that I put together, but it’s a start. There are definitional issues, for one thing, especially in Japan. Japan, which has very accurate (or precise?) data, counts Pure Land priests as monastics, although it could be argued that they are not recognizably monks. Other countries, e.g., Laos, just don’t have good information at all and I had to guess. China, because of its size, is in a league of its own; Buddhism, and religions in general, are seeing a renaissance, but it’s very hard to say how many Chinese Buddhist monks and nuns there are.

Moving this spreadsheet to Many Eyes was simple. I copied the table I wanted to move, pasted it into a textarea and then agreed to the tool’s guesses at the data types. It’s much like DabbleDB and others in that category.

Where the service really excels (pardon the pun) is in the visualization tools; I especially like the Treemap view. For me, the primary insight from the visualizations is the existence of a “Buddhist Big Three”: Thailand, Japan, and Burma (Myanmar).

Novell and OpenID

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Dale Olds has two (!) good blog entries today about Bandit, in which he describes how Bandit supports other open source identity projects, including OpenID, and adds authentication, authorization, and audit functionality. He writes,

You might say that accelerating convergence, contributing code to other projects, and some authentication code is necessary before we can build effective authorization and audit components. We need a cohesive, distributed identity system. But we also know that when we get such a system, some critical issues involving authentication, authorization, and audit will surface.

Bandit focuses on simple, reusable components for authentication, authorization, and audit. These capabilities are most recognized as needed in enterprise identity systems, but I think they will be needed in other places as well. The recent experiences of the Bandit team and others are confirming this. Once applications or services (web based or otherwise) start to actually be used by more than a few users and sources of identity, they immediately find they need a general, scalable solution for authorization and audit.

Posts here and here.

Dell Ideastorm

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Interesting new ‘community’ site from Dell, “Ideastorm.”

[Later: Jon Bultmeyer points to a similar site at Salesforce.com.]

Kevin Rollins was famously ambivalent about the consumer market. His ouster, Michael Dell’s return, and other recent changes, including Ideastorm, seem to suggest that they’re looking again at the consumer business. Ideastorm has a very Web 2.0 look and the early discussions are what you would expect from the same group of 25,000 people who try everything first: pre-load Linux(es), Open Office, get rid of the pestware that comes with new Dell PCs, etc.

I’ve written before that a bad support call made me swear off of Dell consumer products. I still like and recommend their enterpise-grade stuff, but when I needed to get a new desktop machine for myself, I ended up getting a sweet deal from EndPCNoise and never thought of going to Dell.

Two SmugMug bits: Sun and Amazon

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Interesting comparison of hardware vendors from a photo-sharing site, SmugMug:

Sun ended up winning their business, largely on the basis of the X2200 M2, which is interesting in of itself.  The list of pros and cons is worth reading.  Sun continues to be a fascinating company to watch, with great technology, but backed into a strategic corner with a questionable business model.

Separately, but also from Don McAskill’s blog, an interesting post on Amazon’s S3 service.  I’ve been looking around for a good S3-based backup offering but haven’t found one yet.  Jungledisk seems like it’s the closest, but I’d prefer something a bit more mature.