Asimov - Science Fiction
Since I can remember I have been a fan of Asimov’s Science Fiction. The Foundation series is my absolute favorite. Asimov, however, was at his best when writing short stories. These short stories are “short” on length but incredibly complex and full of implications for matters as broad as religion, God, evolution and decline of civilization and so on… I consider “Nightfall” his second best work with an ending that takes your breath away - gives you goosebumps! But I reserve the title of best Asimov work ever to “The Last Question”. It packs such a powerful punch in just one sentence in the end that you keep pondering over it for long after you have read the story. Its so completely incredible and yet so feasible…
Now - some good soul has done us all a favor and put “The Last Question” online for all to read. If you have not read it as yet then you are in for a time of your life. Enjoy - here is the link.
I could not find an online version of “Nightfall”. If you know where I can find it - please do let me know.
Research Update
This year is turning out to be a great year. Another paper of mine titled “Collaboration Network Structure in Open Source Software Projects” has been accepted for presentation at the 5th AIS SIGSAND Symposium on Research in System Analysis and Design to held on May 12-13, 2007 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here is the abstract of the paper:
In this study, we view open source development teams as social collaboration networks of developers. By integrating theories and methods from social network, software engineering and organizational behavior studies, we examined the collaboration network structure of ongoing open source projects and the impact of the network structure on open source developer productivity. With development data from SourceForge.net, we found that open source developers, like their counterparts in traditional software development setting, have the tendency to use larger and less centralized collaboration network structure to tackle more difficult projects. However, such collaboration structure is associated with lower developer productivity. Our findings indicate that OSS practitioners still need to deliberately manage collaboration structure of the development teams to enhance productivity.
This research is co-authored with Ning Nan (University of Oklahoma) and Li Wang (Ross, Michigan). As usual, a copy of the paper is available on request.
Lastly, Thank you Miron for linking to my blog.
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