Over the past two weeks I’ve read a book about the future of American higher ed, and want to recommend it very highly.  It might be the most important book on the subject published this year.

declining and falling off the Rooshan Empire

A stamp in the passport, Portrait, a place I must visit without ever feeling it necessary to return, though I might want to wander out now and then to drop in on Joyce’s poetry, roughly contemporary with the first novel, those curious “pomes,” wearing their spats and dandyish nosegays, occasionally taking up a putative lute to croon promises of theoretical love to unconvincing maidens in the windows of canvas-flat donjons.

8-1-439

The Most Important Philosophical Books Since 1950?

The Great Vietnam War Novel Was Not Written by an American

Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Lit: A Primer from Viet Thanh Nguyen

In practice, this is accomplished by monitoring the amount of operational work being done by SREs, and redirecting excess operational work to the product development teams: reassigning bugs and tickets to development managers, [re]integrating developers into on-call pager rotations, and so on. The redirection ends when the operational load drops back to 50% or lower.

The hero jack-of-all-trades on-call engineer does work, but the practiced on-call engineer armed with a playbook works much better. While no playbook, no matter how comprehensive it may be, is a substitute for smart engineers able to think on the fly, clear and thorough troubleshooting steps and tips are valuable when responding to a high-stakes or time-sensitive page.

The business or the product must establish the system’s availability target. Once that target is established, the error budget is one minus the availability target. A service that’s 99.99% available is 0.01% unavailable. That permitted 0.01% unavailability is the service’s error budget. We can spend the budget on anything we want, as long as we don’t overspend it.

Monitoring is one of the primary means by which service owners keep track of a system’s health and availability. As such, monitoring strategy should be constructed thoughtfully.

Reliability is a function of mean time to failure (MTTF) and mean time to repair (MTTR) [Sch15]. The most relevant metric in evaluating the effectiveness of emergency response is how quickly the response team can bring the system back to health—that is, the MTTR.

In general, for any software service or system, 100% is not the right reliability target because no user can tell the difference between a system being 100% available and 99.999% available.

When they are focused on operations work, on average, SREs should receive a maximum of two events per 8–12-hour on-call shift. This target volume gives the on-call engineer enough time to handle the event accurately and quickly, clean up and restore normal service, and then conduct a postmortem. If more than two events occur regularly per on-call shift, problems can’t be investigated thoroughly and engineers are sufficiently overwhelmed to prevent them from learning from these events.

In general, an SRE team is responsible for the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning of their service(s).

Therefore, Google places a 50% cap on the aggregate "ops" work for all SREs—tickets, on-call, manual tasks, etc. This cap ensures that the SRE team has enough time in their schedule to make the service stable and operable.

By design, it is crucial that SRE teams are focused on engineering. Without constant engineering, operations load increases and teams will need more people just to keep pace with the workload.

What exactly is Site Reliability Engineering, as it has come to be defined at Google? My explanation is simple: SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.

Google has chosen to run our systems with a different approach: our Site Reliability Engineering teams focus on hiring software engineers to run our products and to create systems to accomplish the work that would otherwise be performed, often manually, by sysadmins.

the asteroid mining and the cultures that sprout up

The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science

Seth Lloyd’s “Programming the Universe”

endless virtual book club —

Al-Ghazali launched a philosophical critique against Neoplatonic-influenced early Islamic philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. In response to the philosophers' claim that the created order is governed by secondary efficient causes (God being, as it were, the Primary and Final Cause in an ontological and logical sense), Ghazali argues that what we observe as regularity in nature based presumably upon some natural law is actually a kind of constant and continual regularity. There is no independent necessitation of change and becoming, other than what God has ordained.

2014 Action Teaching Award: Honorable Mention

we did so, we solicited questions through various social media, and we made sure to address as many of them as we could. And then, we worked through the transcripts, again and again, clarifying our concepts, refining our arguments, shuffling the pieces to insure greater clarity and accessibility

such that they cannot be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device

Ninety-five per cent. of all our volume of business is being done with what we call exchange of bank deposits—that is simply book-keeping entries in banks against which people write cheques?

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

Borgman offers case studies of data practices in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and then considers the implications of her findings for scholarly practice and research policy.

Big Data, Little Data, No Data

A Thousand Acres. By Jane Smiley. New York: Ballantine, 1991. $12.00

The Crossing. By Cormac McCarthy. New York: Random House, 1994. $13.00.

Remember Me. By Laura Hendrie. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. $24.00.

Plainsong. By Kent Haruf. New York: Knopf, 1999. $24.00.

The Meadow. By James Galvin. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. $12.00.

Strange Angels. By Jonis Agee. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. $12.00.

Fools Crow By James Welch

Roughing It by Mark Twain

Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses (1992)

John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960)

Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1940)

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なるほどこの孤独な行為はアンブロシウスと同じだなあと、感心して見とれていた。