Victor Rozek
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As I See It: Still Buoyant After All These Years
December 10, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIT is a buoyant profession. It stays afloat in turbulent economic waters. Just in the last four years, it has weathered recession, high unemployment, offshoring, outsourcing, looming austerity, and two rounds of quantitative easing courtesy of Ben Bernanke. (Quantitative easing is a banker’s euphemism for printing tons of money with little benefit to anyone but the bankers.) Nonetheless, it appears the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery.
If so, IT remains the one indispensable asset across all sectors and enterprises. Consider that during the ravages of Sandy, not every business was able to save its inventory, but you
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As I See It: How IT Decided The Election
December 3, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIn retrospect, analyzing wars to determine the exact tipping point for the victorious side is tricky business. There are multiple battles and often multiple fronts. Strategic decision making, tactical challenges, advantages in weaponry, motivation of the fighting force, and a hundred other factors all play a part. As, sometimes, does chance. Just deciding if divine favoritism played a part would be a subject of testy debate, although that advantage is usually claimed by the winner.
The aftermath of elections loosely resembles the aftermath of wars, at least in the extensive postmortem analysis. Where victory and defeat are concerned, both sides
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As I See It: The Many Faces Of Creativity
November 12, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreOne of the challenges of writing a bi-monthly column is continually coming up with interesting ideas. In the Internet age, it is humbling to discover that hundreds of writers have already explored a particular topic I believed was original. For that matter, just finding a fresh take on a subject like computing–which returns 375 million Google hits–is about as tricky as electing a third-party candidate. Which is why, I suppose, there is a truism among writers: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.”
Software development is a lot like writing, only it often requires mastery of multiple languages. And given the
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As I See It: Born Again Computers
October 29, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreSmall business start-ups have a notoriously short half-life. And non-profits are even less likely to thrive. With the ascendency of Wall Street-style greed, doing good fell out of fashion, and packing a conscience became regarded as more hindrance than help. But in an era when those most blessed by fortune have backed away from communal responsibility, it is still possible for empathy to bind with hard work and create an enterprise that is both successful and honorable.
One such enterprise not only provides a valuable service but, within its sphere of influence, is also addressing stubborn social challenges and a
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As I See It: Sub-Atomic Dreams
October 22, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreTheoretical physicist Brian Greene once observed: “No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you’re going to fail.” God knows I’ve tried, but my cat is just not interested in relativity. That’s so yesterday. She wants to learn quantum mechanics. But the thing about quantum mechanics is that only a handful of people on the planet can truly claim to understand it. And that’s probably an exaggeration. Even Einstein called it “spooky.”
Not only is the math beyond the capabilities of the average smartphone, but concepts like “superposition,” “entanglement,” and “decoherence” have about as much in
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As I See It: Chasing The Impulse
October 15, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreWhat if there was a simple experiment that could predict the trajectory of a 4-year-old’s life. Seems improbable. After all, toddlers are no more fully formed than Greek economic policy. But such an instrument exists and it involves marshmallows.
The experiment was the brainchild of psychologist Walter Mischel and it dates back to the 1960s when experimentation of any sort usually involved drugs. It was conducted at a preschool on the Stanford University campus with the children of faculty members and graduate students, which suggests that the little dauphins were strangers to privation. The test was simplicity itself, and the
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As I See It: Legacy
September 24, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIt was shaping up to be a near-perfect day, except for that not-so-small matter of the dead horse. It began as the big finish to a busy summer; a trip to the Wallowas (Oregon’s mini-version of the Swiss Alps) to visit a friend and, ostensibly, to spend a little time in the mountains. Personally, I love mountains with a yearning that borders on the irrational, and I hadn’t had my fill of the high country this year, so I was eager and impatient to hit the trail. The morning after we arrived, I stood outside in the crisp early-autumn air,
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As I See It: Game Changer
September 10, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreLet’s say you’re young and idealistic and still naive enough to believe what politicians tell you. And after watching one of our three-day infomercials, otherwise known as conventions, you’re feeling inspired to register voters for your favorite candidate. But you have no registration forms (which often vary from precinct to precinct), and even if you did, who knows where one precinct ends and another begins? Plus, you don’t really know what you should say, or which doors are likely to remain open once you reveal your party affiliation. But you do have something in your pocket that can solve all
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As I See It: All the Server People, Hot, Hot, Hot
August 27, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThe same day the temperature topped 110 degrees in Oklahoma, I happened to listen to a radio broadcast featuring several scientists and climatologists discussing climate change predictions for the Pacific Northwest. Computer models foretell that–in the not too distant future–temperatures will rise 7 to 15 degrees, and the snowpack in the Cascades may fall as low as 5 percent of current levels. As a result, some rivers are likely to be seasonal, and those with moderate water flows will be too warm to support salmon and other fish stocks.
In the Midwest, the future appears to have already arrived. Thousands
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As I See It: The Other Motivator
August 13, 2012 Victor Rozek
… Read moreWith the Olympics having just concluded, a number of third-tier events will again fade into quadrennial oblivion. Sports like synchronized swimming, skeet shooting, and beach volleyball (in which scantly clad women frolic in the icy British rain) got their 15 minutes of exposure, if not fame, and will now be consigned to the devotions of small bands of loyalists. One such sport, parochially known as ping pong, has been upgraded to the more sober-sounding table tennis by serious practitioners who have transformed a basement pastime to a form of quick-twitch warfare.
I was curious about the sport because of a