You might think this time is different, but as Carmen Reinhart has shown in this report it's just not true. If you read just one paper to get some perspective on the current financial crisis, read hers. The full paper (124 pages) is archived here.

After being embedded as an observer and participant in the financial industry for quite some time it comes as no suprise that even one of the giants on Wallstreet can stumble and crash.

If a tree falls down in the woods and no one is around to hear it - does it make a sound?

The Singularity Institute just announced the release of the Open Cognition Framework developed by Ben Goertzel.

The Open Cognition Framework (OpenCog) is software for the collaborative development of safe and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence.

OpenCog provides research scientists and software developers with a common platform to build and share artificial intelligence programs. The framework includes:

• a flexible and highly optimized in-memory database for knowledge representation,
• a plug-in architecture for cognitive algorithms and a cognitive process scheduler,
• a built-in LISP-like programming language, and
• other components to support artificial intelligence research and development.

Programs written or adapted for OpenCog may be combined and used in concert with one another for experimentation or to achieve better results compared to their stand-alone counterparts.

I will be visiting Boston next week for ten days. So, if you're in the region and would like to meet up for a beer or two drop me an email or ping me via Skype (ID: lispmeister).

Things I look forward to: Bookstores, though my credit card is now labeled "Not valid in bookstores unless holder is accompanied by a responsible person", visiting the Computer Museum, specifically the CADR shrine and picking up the three OLPC X0 laptops I ordered in December.

Markus Völter interviewed Dick Gabriel at OOPSLA 2007. Don't miss Dick's explanation of Lisp's EVAL! [via Mike Ajemian]

Dick initiated the idea of a Master of Fine Arts in Software and my recent experience with the software creation process, if you dare call it a process, in the financial industry indicates, we should make it mandatory for any software architecture position.

And in closing let me quote from Dick's essay The Art of Lisp & Writing:

Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer.

Links:

• Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel
• Poem a Day project by Richard P. Gabriel
• Eternal Flame/God Wrote in LISP interpreted by Julia Ecklar
• The Art of Lisp & Writing by Richard P. Gabriel (the foreword to Successful Lisp by David B. Lamkins)
• Markus Völter's homepage

Reading Greg Linden's blog I realized that the technology I developed for medigist five years ago was an excercise in computational advertising.

Here's a project overview:

• Web-crawl a list of URLs and fetch new medical news content [Common Lisp]
• Clean up news using source specific filters and store into database [Common Lisp]
• Automatically tag news according to medical themes using a statistical text classifier [Common Lisp]
• Web subscription interface for medical topics [PHP]
• Manage advertising campaigns and related medical topics and upload PDF ads [PHP]
• Create monthly medical journal (PDF) for each user containing personalized news and ads [Perl, TeX]
• Track click-through rate for news and ads using a trampoline for each embedded article and ad [PHP]
• Do post analysis on click-throughs to improve content and ad selection for each user [Common Lisp]

Recently Dan Weinreb mentioned a paper about ObjectStore he co-authored with Charles Lamb, Gordon Landis and Jack Orenstein in 1991. It's a bit hard to find unless you have an ACM account. I've made it available here. Enjoy!

After reading Dan Weinreb's posting I ordered three OLPC XO notebooks. I've met Walter Bender some years ago through a licensing deal with MIT Media Lab. He is now heading the OLPC initiative. This is quite likely the most significant project since Tim Berners Lee's invention of the WWW.

Some nice features of the XO-1:

• Comes with source code for all applications and most of the operating system. There's even a View Source button on the keyboard that shows the code of what's running.
• Based on Linux, but application code is in Python
• 1200x900 7.5" diagonal LCD that works without backlight in bright daylight
• Wireless networking capable of mesh mode
• 2- or 5-cell LiFePO4 battery pack
• Built in color camera

Links:

• Review of the XO-1 by a 12 year old blogger
• Great technical info in the video of the talk at Google by Ivan Krstic, who is the architect of Bitfrost but talks about all aspects of the system

Link to the source article in European Psychiatry.

During lunch Paul Dale and I talked about self modifying code and how it might apply to real world systems. Later that same day I did a quick check on Wikipedia to read up on the current state of the art. I was surprised to find a link to a paper about self modifying kernel code by Henry Massalin. Reading his PhD thesis about the Synthesis kernel, like learning Lisp, is a mind altering experience. This guy is a genius! My first thought after reading the introduction was: This has to be added to the Movitz kernel!

The Synthesis paper lists four new ideas:

• Run-time code synthesis — a systematic way of creating executable machine code at runtime to optimize frequently-used kernel routines — queues, buffers, context switchers, interrupt handlers, and system call dispatchers — for specific situations, greatly reducing their execution time.
• Fine-grained scheduling — a new process-scheduling technique based on the idea of feedback that performs frequent scheduling actions and policy adjustments (at sub-millisecond intervals) resulting in an adaptive, self-tuning system that can support real-time data streams.
• Lock-free optimistic synchronization is shown to be a practical, efficient alternative to lock-based synchronization methods for the implementation of multiprocessor operating system kernels.
• An extensible kernel design that provides for simple expansion to support new kernel services and hardware devices while allowing a tight coupling between the kernel and the application, blurring the distinction between user and kernel services.

I was curious what a guy like Henry had been doing since finishing his PhD in 1992. Some googling showed that he's working for MicroUnity, a startup that somehow never got any serious traction, filing one patent after another. He is famous for giving people piggyback rides (the inventors of UNIX among them) and he is now known as Ms. Alexia Massalin. Talk about self modification!

Links:

• Synthesis: An Efficient Implementation of Fundamental Operating System Services, Henry Massalin's PhD thesis
• Synthesis, original location of the same paper as Postscript
• Movitz: a Common Lisp x86 development platform, a project started by Frode Vatvedt Fjeld
• Qua, a WIRED article about Henry Massalin
• Superoptimizer: a look at the smallest program by Henry Massalin
• MicroUnity homepage, Alexia Massalin's current employer
• In the Land of the Weird, Standing Out Takes a Little Work, NYTimes article about Dean Dierschow and Alexia Massalin