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Date:	Mon, 4 Jun 2001 07:50:18 PDT
From:	"Lynn H. Maxson" <lmaxson@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-sundialsig@scoug.com
To:	< "scoug-sundialsig@scoug.com" > scoug-sundialsig@scoug.com >
Subject:	SCOUG-SundialSIG: June meeting

Content Type: text/plain

Apparently from the comments from Sheridan George and Mark
Abramowitz I'm dealing with a silent, but easily entertained
majority. For that reason you must have really enjoyed my getting
blindsided by Peter Skye's use of unstructured data streams (which
really aren't) as a storage media in his data base. You must
have wondered (as did I) at his purchase of a computer that a
priori understood his processing needs, furnishing him with
desired information on demand.

I happen to agree with Tony Butka about having fun even in the
most serious of circumstances. I don't quite have Peter's ability
to be "on" continuously, though I stuggle to do so. When it comes
to data and programming, i.e. data processing, there are literally
thousands of choices available in terms of data designs and
programming languages. While an SQL query may be an obvious
member of programming languages it may not be as obvious that a
spreadsheet introduces one of its own, part textual, part visual.

My goal is to show the underlying structure which is common to all
forms. That's why I specialize in generalizations. The essence
lies in not dictating choice to people, but in giving them a
formal logic (reasoned form) onto which they can fashion a data
design and programming language of their choice.

Besides I am extremely poor at learning by rote, i.e. piece
learning. This relies, one, on faith, and, two, on an individual
ability in induction, i.e. to understand the whole from an
understanding of its parts. In my mind this is learning by
osmosis with the possibility that the parts will never cross
through the membrane to create the whole.

Instead I prefer learning by deduction, beginning with the whole
and then decomposing it into its parts. The whole in this
instance is the basic set of assumptions (axioms) and definitions:
the skeleton. From these to develop the parts: the flesh.
Besides Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin over forty years ago in their
"Study of Thinking" determined that most preferred deduction to
induction. As one who has never mastered mathematical induction I
am inclined to agree.

So if we engage in using a spreadsheet, a database manager, a
programming language, we engage in data processing. The purpose
of this lies in producing information, i.e. the meaning the user
obtains from the presented data. Of interest here lies in
reducing the "additional" processing performed by the user to
separate out the "needed" from the "unneeded" data and its
"mental" reorganization to an optimal, informational form.

What we discover is that we have a WORM technology: Write Once
(data store), Read Many (data present). This knowledge drives
data design as output oriented in terms of optimal form. The
output determines the input, i.e. the stored form. In truth the
stored form is the output of processing the input form. Once more
the output determines the input. We have three forms, input,
stored, output, which we can express as input->stored->output.
The output determines the optimal form of the stored which in turn
determines the optimal form of the input, both optimal forms
result in minimal processing overall.

I don't know what humor, if any, exists in the foregoing. What
you do have is yet another reason not to sit close to me at the
meetings.

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