DOI: 10.1145/1866739.1866741

to change the World, take a chance

Some of what Constantine Dovrolis said in the Point/ Counterpoint “Future In- ternet Architecture: Clean- Slate Versus Evolutionary
Research” (Sept. 2010) concerning an
evolutionary approach to developing
Internet architecture made sense, and,
like Jennifer Rexford on the other side,
I applaud and encourage the related
“evolutionary” research. But I found
his “pragmatic vision” argument nei-
ther pragmatic nor visionary. Worse
was the impudence of the claim of
“practicality.”
Mid-20th century mathematician
Morris Kline said it best when referring
to the history of mathematics: “The
lesson of history is that our firmest
convictions are not to be asserted dog-
For example, it took 2,000 years for
geometry to move beyond the “prag-
matism” of the parallel postulate,
some 200 years for Einstein to overtake
Newton, 1,400 years for Copernicus to
see beyond Ptolemy, and 10,000 years
for industrialization to supplant agri-
culture as the dominant economic ac-
tivity. The Internet’s paltry 40–50-year
history is negligible compared to these
other clean-slate revolutions.

What Deeper implications
for offshoring?

As someone who has known offshoring for years, I was drawn to the article “How Offshoring Affects IT Workers” by Prasanna B. Tambe and Lorin M. Hitt (Oct. 2010) but disappointed to find a survey-type analysis that essentially confirmed less than what most of us in the field already know. For example, at least one reason higher-salaried workers are less likely to be offshored is they already appreciate the value of being able to bridge the skill and cultural gap created by employing offshore workers.

I was also disappointed by the article’s U.S.-centric view (implied at the top in the word “offshoring”). What about how offshoring affects IT workers in countries other than the U.S.? In my experience, they are likewise affected; for example, in India IT workers are in the midst of a dramatic cultural upheaval involving a high rate of turnover.

While seeking deeper insight into offshoring, I would like to ask someone to explain the implications of giving the keys to a mission-critical system to someone in another country not subject to U.S. law? Imagine if the relationships between countries would deteriorate, and the other country would seize critical information assets? We have pursued offshoring for years, but I have still not heard substantive answers to these questions.

mark Wiman, atlanta, Ga

authors’ Response:

With so little hard data on outsourcing, it is important to first confirm some of the many anecdotes now circulating. The main point of the article was that the vulnerability of occupations to offshoring can be captured by their skill sets and that the skills story is not the only narrative in the outsourcing debate.

The study was U.S.-centric by design.
How offshoring affects IT workers in other
countries is important, but the effects of
offshoring on the U.S. IT labor market
merits its own discussion.

 

interpreting Data 100 Years on Looking to preserve data for a century or more involves two challenging orthogonal problems, one—how to preserve the bits—addressed by David S.H. Rosenthal in his article “ Keeping Bits Safe: How Hard Can It Be?” (Nov. 2010). The other is how to read and interpret them 100 years on when everything might have changed— formats, protocols, architecture, storage system, operating system, and more. Consider the dramatic changes over just the past 20 years. There is also the challenge of how to design, build, and test complete systems, trying to anticipate how they will be used in 100 years. The common, expensive solution is to migrate all the data every time something changes while controlling costs by limiting the amount of data that must be preserved in light of dedupli-cation, legal obsolescence, librarians, archivists, and other factors.

For more on data interpretation see:

1. Lorie, R.A. A methodology and system for preserving digital data. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Portland, OR, July 2002), 312–319.

2. Lorie, R.A. Long-term preservation of digital information. In Proceedings of the First ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Roanoke, VA, Jan. 2001), 346–352.

3. Rothenberg, J. Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation. Council on Library & Information Resources, 1999.