Rants and comments on lifestyle, virtuality, software engineering and other worthy issues
After almost a decade trying to get it, yesterday I received a copy of After Man by Dougal Dixon. I got it from an Amazon.com seller, second hand.
I recall browsing through the pages of that book, back in the 1980s, and being mesmerized at the drawings and the stories within. Last night I browsed through the book again and I wasn’t disappointed. Quite the opposite; I am utterly impressed.
Here at CSIC Galicia we have a very good media person, and my colleague Cristina Sanchez-Carretero and I, who have recently joined the Heritage Lab in Santiago de Compostela as staff researchers, are getting lots of press coverage lately. Well, not lots, but definitely a lot more than what I am used to. In the last few weeks I have been interviewed a few times and I have appeared in a number of local and regional newspapers.
Usually, I like media. Or, rather, I like the work they do. I appreciate their role in society and I understand that they are necessary elements that help us researchers spread the word of what we do to non-technical people. We need them; without them, we would be forever isolated in our lonely ivory towers.
However, sometimes they fail miserably. Last monday, the local paper De Luns a Venres included an interview with me based on a phone conversation that a journalist from that paper and I had held a few days back. I wasn’t sure when my interview would be published, and when that Monday I opened the paper on the bus on my way to work and saw my own face staring at me with that haunted look, I could not help but anticipate that something was wrong. I read through and yes, there it was. The answers to some of the questions that I get asked in the interview are totally or partially made up. Yes, that’s what I mean: I didn’t answer what you can read on the paper.
In some cases, they “extended” what I really answered on the phone with some adornments. Maybe they felt my answer was too terse or bland for their audience. In some other cases, the answer I gave is just not there, and an alternative, totally unrelated answer takes its place.
I couldn’t believe the lack of professionalism exhibited by this paper. This is a brief interview and I am not talking about anything important; it’s just a few personal things and a very, very abstract description of what I do at work. Still, making up interview answers is appalling.
So, don’t trust what you read. Not everything, anyway.
What do throat lozenges and OO modelling have in common?
In particular, what do Juanolas and whole/part relationships in class diagrams have in common? I guess you’ll understand if you follow the links, or if you are familiar with both Juanolas and OO modelling.
Let me give you some background.
I am participating in a project where a formal language for the description of heritage buildings is being developed. The project team is made of two archaeologists, an architect, and me as the software guy. They are the domain specialists; I am the techie. From the very beginning, I started using class diagrams to capture the information that my three colleagues would consider relevant, and they seemed to like them. They got themselves a copy of Visio and started producing their own class diagrams. I gave them a quick description of what specialisation, whole/part relationships and associations mean, and showed them how to use different symbols to depict them. No, I didn’t use UML symbols. UML is broken and invariable drives you to irresoluble quandaries, so I wouldn’t be so mean to expose my poor software-virgin humanities friends to mind-twisting UML. I used OPEN/Metis notation, as I have been doing for almost a decade now.
The outcomes of all this is that, after a few weeks, my team mates are actually class modelling now. Amazing. The only unorthodox bit is that they call whole/part diamonds “Juanolas” for evident reasons.
